We added 1/2 medium chopped onion about a clove of minced garlic and some crushed rosemary in addition to the ingredients in the printed recipe. This recipe was suprisingly delicious and will be added to our regular rotation. The only downside is that it takes an hour in the oven so it's not a quick side dish.

Reviewed On: Jan. 26, 2011

These cookies were delicious! This recipe is a keeper. I got 2 Silpat mats for Christmas and I've been dying to use them. They worked wonderfully! I changed a few things that made the cookies that much better: I too used half butter/half shortening and half brown/half white sugar like I saw in someone's review. It made the cookies thick and very moist. I used a heaping melon ball scooper and got 4 dozen cookies. We added 1/2 cup of dried cranberries to half of the batter and the cranberries just put these cookies over the top for me! My fiance prefers the ones without cranberries but he liked both and he usually won't eat cranberries. 8 minutes left the cookies a little too moist. Just shy of 10 minutes seems to be right with my oven. I added a teaspoon of butter flavoring to enhance the shortening and a teaspoon of chocolate flavoring since I was a little short on cocoa powder. We will make these again soon!

Reviewed On: Jan. 17, 2010

When I've used Royal Icing in the past it can take up to 2 days to set and as I was decorating the cookies for the next morning I had to have something that set overnight. This did set overnight, held sprinkles fabulously, was easy to pipe and kept its shape. I didn't think it was too sweet, I added half almond half vanilla flavoring. The reason I gave it 3 stars is that it separated... I added rose petal pink wilton gel coloring and mixed well and the color separated. It looked almost marbled (although not as pretty). I know that shortening can cause this sometimes but I was using all vegetable shortening and all my ingredients were fresh. It was even a new pot of gel color, I had to remove the foil seal. In reading the other reviews noone else mentioned this so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Reviewed On: Feb. 17, 2009