If you're hosting an eclipse party for an upcoming solar eclipse, our eclipse cookies are a great way to get everyone excited for the main event.
My daughter was just a couple of weeks old when she witnessed her first solar eclipse.
We may have had better eclipse viewing in the south of England, but nevertheless I sat on the back steps of our house in Glasgow with her in my arms as the sky dimmed and the birds went silent.
This was her first astronomical event!
Find out when the next eclipse is occurring and how to safely view an eclipse.
When we watched Brian Cox’s Wonders series we were enthralled as the Moon eclipsed the Sun over the Ganges.
It truly is one of the wonders of the cosmos that our Solar System is aligned with the Moon and Sun sized and positioned so that a beautiful event such as a solar eclipse occur.
We were able to catch a glimpse of this wonder ourselves in 2015 when the Solar eclipse reached nearer totality in Scotland.
That morning the day dawned grey with cloud cover: not promising!
My son and I were hoping to view the eclipse on our walk to school.
As we set out, there was cloud cover but the light was fading.
Halfway to school the cloud thinned, a glimpse of a clipped Sun then … cloud cover!
Reaching the school gates, the clouds thinned again sufficiently to reveal a crescent Sun! Wow!
Meanwhile my daughter had convinced her chemistry teacher that an eclipse was more important than the periodic table, at least for one lesson.
She headed to the top of the science building and as the clouds thinned she glimpsed the Sun eclipsed over the city.
This recipe is for cookies in the American style: two biscuits sandwiched with buttercream.
The idea is to create different patterns on each cookies, so that you can recreate the different stages of the eclipse that occur as the Moon's silhouette slowly makes it's way across the solar disc.
For this, you'll need to make two batches of the cookie dough: one with custard powder to represent the Sun
The other with cocoa powder to represent the Moon taking a 'bite' out of the solar disc.
Eclipse cookies ingredients
Cookies
We need two batches of biscuit dough each made with:
- 150g Butter
- 50g icing sugar
- 150g plain flour
- 2 tbsps custard powder OR 2 tbsps cocoa powder
Icing
- 150g icing sugar
- 25g Butter
- ½ teaspoon vanilla essence
- A little hot water
Eclipse cookies recipe, step-by-step
Step 1 - butter and sugar
Beat together the butter and icing sugar until it is soft and creamy.
Step 2 - flour and custard
Mix in the custard powder, ensuring everything is thoroughly mixed.
Step 3 - wrap and chill
Bring the dough together into a ball and wrap in cling-film.
Refrigerate for half an hour, or until you are ready to roll!
Step 4 - make your cocoa batch
Make the second batch of dough replacing the custard powder with cocoa powder.
Step 5 - cut the shapes
Roll each colour of dough out to the thickness of a pound coin.
Use a circular cutter to cut out the light and dark discs.
I used a 5cm cutter and made 48 biscuits from each batch of dough.
If you use a cutter with a larger diameter you will need to bake the cookies for a little longer.
Step 6 - layer the cookies
Pair each light circle with a dark one and use the same cutter to cut varying sizes of crescents, or degrees of totality.
Step 7 - prepare for baking
Keeping the pairs of biscuits together, swap the cut pieces and place them on a baking tray.
You will have pairs of cookies, one looking like the Sun with a ‘bite’ taken.
The other will be its reverse!
Step 8 - bake!
Bake the cookies at 180°C or 350°F for about 10 minutes.
When cooked they will be firm but the pale parts will not be coloured.
Allow to cool on the baking tray for a couple of minutes.
Move to a cooling rack until cold.
Step 9 - make the buttercream
Make your buttercream filling.
Mix together the icing sugar, butter and 10ml hot water.
Add a little more hot water, a few drops at a time until your icing is a spreading consistency.
Step 10 - spread the buttercream
Spread a teaspoon of buttercream onto one half of each pair of biscuits and sandwich them together.
Alternatively you can use a piping bag to pipe the buttercream on.
Step 11 - serve!
Serve your eclipse cookies to your guests.
Hint: make sure you serve the cookies the right way up or, as my son pointed out when I didn’t, the Sun will be eclipsing the Moon!
All images by Katharine Kilgour
Have you baked our eclipse cookies for your eclipse party? Let us know how you got on by emailing us at contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com