Having made Pokeball cookies as a birthday treat for my kid’s class last year, I breathed a sigh of relief and assumed I would never have to do that again.
However, they were requested again! But this time, without the luxury of a weekend to practise, and no memory of the actual sugar cookie recipe I used. So I just made it up as I went along and it turned out ok. But I vowed to make notes this time, in case they are requested again.
This year I used this Alton Brown sugar cookie recipe, which worked well DESPITE the non-metric measurements. I subbed 250 g butter for the stated 1 cup butter (at least it wasn’t in sticks), and the dough was sticky – I ended up adding a few more tablespoons of flour. Later I realised the US cup is 240 mL, so that extra 10 g may have made a difference.
Last year I used a lot of MATHS to work out the proportion of black and red dough, but I couldn’t remember any of it, and so I made it up on the fly. I ended up with about 890 g dough, and dyed 400g red, 90 g black, with the remainder staying ‘white’. This was too much red, as I needed about 40 g of white for the middle circle, so I only needed 360 g for the red section.
I aimed for a log that was about 26-27 cm long, as I needed 33 cookies for the class (assuming about half a cm thick cookies). They were about 5 cm diameter and i think overall better proportioned than last year I probalby got 40-45 in the end. The dough was not chilled enough (no time), so the Pokeballs were a bit wonky. More chilling would help.
I can’t find the instructions I used to make the actual shape – not this one, which has weirdly thick black lines, but here are some photos of construction (from last year).
TEH Omnivore 