Tetris Cookies

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved playing Tetris on my GameBoy. Just the word "Tetris" gets that electronic Russian music in my head all over again like an '80s earworm. It's hard not to like Tetris. It's problem solving, creative thinking, and stress management for adults and just plain fun for kids. My husband had a game night at his work and I wanted to contribute something, so when I saw these Tetris cookies by PSHeart, I thought they were perfect! I doubled my recipe, just like the original post did, but there's one little detail they left out that I want to warn you about...

Before I get to that, here's what you'll need to make 88 Tetris sugar cookies (more or less, depending on how large or small you cut them!):

1 cup of butter
1 1/2 cups of sugar
4 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 Tablespoon of milk
4 cups of flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder

Preheat your oven to 350 and cream the butter in your mixer. Add your sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, and milk and beat hard.

Add the flour and baking powder and beat again - if it's more liquidy than doughy, it's ok.
Cover your workspace with flour and roll out your dough. The thinner the dough, the crisper the cookies. If it's thick, the dough will puff up in the oven!

Now it's time to make the shapes. If you want to use a template, that'd be the smart solution. I decided to eyeball it instead. Meh.

Pop them in the oven until the bottoms and sides are golden brown (anywhere between 5-9 minutes, depending on the thickness of the cookies.

Let them cool before icing. Now if you have the time, you can make your own royal icing. However, by the time I finally got these puppies out of the oven, two hours had already gone by and I was exhausted. I colored white Pillsbury frosting out of a can instead. Don't kill me.

Now my version of Tetris on the Game Boy wasn't in color so I had no idea what color the pieces should be. Really, you can use any colors you want. If you have a black food writer pen, that'll probably work better than the black Wilton sparkle gel icing I used.

All in all, they were a big hit at game night, even if they didn't look perfect and took over 4 HOURS to make. This is one of those times where you can and should tell your kid, "Don't forget to play with your food!"

TOTAL COSTS: About $20 to make 88 cookies

$.99 for the butter

$2.69 for the sugar

$2.79 for the eggs

$2.29 for the milk

$3.29 for the flour

$1.99 for the baking powder

$1.99 for the frosting

$2.99 for the black Wilton Sparkle Gel

Used homemade vanilla extract and had food coloring on hand

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: A little over 4 hours

10 minutes to make dough

2 hours to cut and bake 88 cookies

2 hours to decorate 63 of them

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 3 out of 5

Getting the right thickness, making sure they didn't burn, getting the black lines to be straight...yeah, there are a few places you could mess up. Heck, I dropped and broke quite a few, so try not to get too frustrated if they don't turn out perfect. Whoever is eating them will think they look and taste delicious, no matter what!