The Snowman and The Snowdog Great Festive Bake Off Blog Tour

I  can remember when The Snowman™ animation was first shown on TV back in 1982, based on the Raymond Briggs book published in 1978.  It was magical, and has been a part of Christmas for me ever since.  The Snowman™ and The Snowdog will be shown on Channel 4 again this Christmas! and Monkey and I will be watching avidly.

To celebrate this fact, I’m taking part in the The Snowman and The Snowdog Great Festive Bake Off Blog Tour which I’m kicking off today, it runs until 5th December and will move from blog to blog.  We will each be making our own The Snowman™ and The Snowdog cookies!  I can bake, but my decorating skills (lack of them) have come to the forefront on this challenge!  I was set some clear instructions by my Monkey son, so I’m totally blaming him for the end results!

Before I set to baking it was time to enjoy this deluxe edition of The Snowman, a hardback version of this beautifully illustrated book, where no words are needed.

The Snowman, published through Puffin Books is a magical tale, told solely with pictures and it’s a book every home should have.  Monkey and I love adding our own little twists to the tale and wondering where Monkey would go if he could fly away with his own snowman one day.  Priced at £12.99, I should expect that this book will be flying into a few Christmas stockings this year.

You may recall that a couple of years ago I reviewed some Christmas baubles from Ravensburger.  Well this year, to stick with our theme we’ve been sent the Ravensburger The Snowman and the Snowdog 3D puzzle bauble.

The 54  puzzle pieces of this jigsaw are numbered on the inside so it’s easy to form into a bauble.  This puzzle comes with stand for display purposes or you can attach the string provided to be able to hang your bauble from your Christmas Tree.

Monkey has already decided the bauble is going to be on display in his bedroom this Christmas.  The puzzle is available from John Lewis and Toys R Us for £4.99.

Now on to the serious stuff, we were sent these lovely cookie cutters which are available to buy from Party Delights for £4.75.

The cutter set includes a cookie recipe, but as I didn’t have any golden syrup in the cupboards I used my own version.

Prep Time – 10 minutes
Cooking time – 10/15 minutes
Passive time – 1 hour

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
1 egg
400g plain flour
1tsp salt
1tsp vanilla extract
1tsp mixed spice
1tbsp olive oil

Instructions

Beat the butter and sugar together
Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat again
Sift flour, salt and spice together in a separate bowl, then add to mixture and beat again until the dough comes together in a ball
Wrap the cookie dough in cling film and chill in the fridge for 1 hour
Roll out on a floured surface to desired thickness and cut your cookie shapes.
Place cookies on a lightly greased baking tray and put in preheated oven on 160 deg C for 10-15 minutes until edges of cookies turn golden brown
Take out and leave to cool on a cooling rack

Once the cookies were baked it was time to decorate them.  I did look at a great video from the Biscuiteers team, but knew our’s would never look that professional and, as I’ve said previously, Monkey had firm ideas of what I was allowed to decorate our Snowman and Snowdog cookies with.

So once I’d iced the cookies, we used  Dr Oetker Writing Icing pens and Cake Angels decorations to complete the look.  Monkey was thrilled with the results and that’s all that matters.

Neither of us will be entering GBBO any time soon, but we’ve had lots of fun with this challenge and getting to eat the end results is not to be sniffed at.

Why not follow the blog tour and see what the rest of the team achieve in the days ahead. Pop over to see Rachel tomorrow for the next installment.

disclaimer:  we were sent the products mentioned to take part in this challenge.