The Eyes of Texas are Upon You

So I know I usually talk about cakes on Saturday, but this week I found out that one of my techs just got into UT School of Pharmacy (my alumni)! I had been trying to help him and had written his letter of recommendation, so I feel like a very proud mentor:) To help celebrate this very special occassion, the kiddos and I made him some UT cookies and burnt orange popcorn!

We had to make the cookies quickly since we left the next day on our Spring Break trip, so we cheated and used store bought dough. My little Princess was super helpful in rolling out the dough and cutting out the cookie shapes.

Of course you have to have a longhorn and Texas cookie cutter to make the perfect UT cookies:)

Here they are cooling off while we made the royal icing. Now I know you can make it with meringue powder, but I don't think it tastes as good, so we made royal icing with egg whites using this recipe:
2 large egg whites

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

3 cups (330 grams) confectioners (powdered or icing) sugar, sifted
Basically, you just beat the egg whites and lemon juice with a hand held mixer while you slowly add the sugar a cup at a time until it's all mixed. Then add your food coloring.

Here's the finished cookies!

For the colored popcorn, we just followed the direction on the back of the popcorn kernel jar, but also added food dye to the oil along with 1/4cup of sugar.

Then we put on the lid and let the popcorn do its thing.

Nothing says UT like burnt orange popcorn! Congrats 'V'!!! I'm so proud of all your hard work!