When I said that Labor Day weekend became a bit of a cookie extravaganza, what I meant was: I made two types of cookies that weren’t chocolate chip in one weekend! Gasp! I am not quite sure what got into me this weekend, but the results were awfully tasty. My friends have had Rutgers football season tickets for a few years, and while I always grumble about how tickets are sold out and I can’t just buy a single game ticket, I haven’t done much about it. Patt and Irma have an extra ticket to each game this season, and offered a few to me, so I got to go to the season opener on Labor Day. Since they are big about tailgating, I said, “Hey! I’ll bring cookies,” because what else am I going to bring? And since I’m unofficially boycotting chocolate chip cookies for a while, I decided to be completely crazy and make red and white football shaped cookies. It’s what you would do, isn’t it?

I used our family’s go-to butter cookie recipe, which is so easy and simple it’s not funny. Of course, the rolling and cookie-cuttering and re-rolling and glazing and icing is not simple. It’s still easy, it’s just a bit labor intensive. Beyond worth it, though. My favorite part of this whole endeavor? The cookie cutter.

My mom has quite a stash of cookie cutters, collected during her years teaching the three year old class at her school (they used it for homemade playdough, duh!). She did not have a football. She did, however, have a dog bone. “Who on earth needs a dog bone cookie cutter?” she asked, and proceeded to bend the crap out of it. I took over and was quite satisfied with my design, which looked exactly like a lumpy potato. My dad and then my brother came to the rescue, first with plyers, and then with very specific ideas of what a football should look like. And so I went to work.

I used a glaze made from confectioners’ sugar and food coloring, and just your plain old tube of white frosting for the laces. That was a pain, but mostly because I didn’t read the instructions and merely poked a hole in the end of the package, rather than cutting the whole end off. Oh well. The cookies are adorable and I am SO happy with them. Coming soon, to your next Superbowl party: football cookies! (And imagine! Baseball cookies! Basketballs! Those I could do without sacrificing old cookie cutters, even!)

The game didn’t turn out as well (I mean, how could it? It’s not baseball!), but there was something pretty magical about being in a sold-out stadium full of people wearing red. Especially since Rutgers’ football team sucked so very badly when I was a student that no one went to games. I’m totally glad I went, and I’m definitely looking forward to going back. Oh, and here’s the recipe for the cookies:

Simple Butter Cookies, recipe from a family friend
1/3 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup orange juice
4 1/4 cups flour

Cream butter and sugar; add egg yolk, then juice. Add flour slowly. Chill dough for one hour. Pre-heat oven to 350. Bake 12-20 minutes, or until the bottoms of the cookies get light brown. Dough freezes well.