Today, November 1, is Lenovo’s 32nd birthday! To celebrate, I made and decorated some cookies to celebrate, because what better reason to make delicious baked treats?

Okay, I lied. You don’t need a reason to make delicious baked treats. But any justification is good enough if you ask me 😉 This just happened to be a good one.

As I’m not the greatest chef in the world, I thought that this could be a learning experience for me as well as those out there who are also not culinarily inclined.

I used this recipe, nice and easy and anyone should be able to make it. One note though: for the biscuits, there’s two mentions of one egg. You add one to the batter, and then you beat one to use to glaze them prior to baking them.

I did make one modification, hardly major: instead of a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract, I used a quarter teaspoon of vanilla bean paste. Vanilla bean paste is usually a bit stronger than extract, so you could probably get away with less if you went down this path.

With the icing, I cheated, mainly because I can’t make icing from scratch to save my life! I used Coles brand Soft Set Vanilla Icing, to which I added some pillar box red food colouring. The white decorations were made using Dr Oetker Designer Icing, which is convenient in that it’s already in a bag that you can squeeze onto whatever you want to decorate (no need to mess around with piping bags) and it comes with some nozzles too.

Lessons Learnt

1. Read the recipe in its entirety! The cook time at the start suggests that these should bake for an hour and ten minutes. In reality, it’s actually 12 minutes and I ended up going a little longer than that to brown them up a bit. Had I gone for an hour and ten minutes, it would have ended quite badly.
2. Allow the cookies to cool for at least overnight before icing them. So the icing doesn’t go runny, otherwise that’ll make a great mess.
3. The Coles icing does need to be heated before use. I just put it in the microwave for 30 seconds with the lid off as per the package directions, after which it was soft enough to stir the food colouring in.
4. Practice! I made a lot more cookies then there are in the photo. Some came out… well, not that great. Coupled with my klutzy baking skills, the ones pictured were the best. Some had too much icing. one had not enough (somehow, I still had a third of the tub left when I was done), and others just had bad decorations. If you’re baking for an event or something, you may want to make a test run for yourself… so you have another reason to make more baked goods! 😜

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So, Happy 32nd Birthday, Lenovo! Hopefully you’ll have many more to come!

Update: the photo embed was broken. Apparently I overcomplicated things – all you need to do is just drop a link into the post to the Instagram photo and not screw around with the embed, as per here.