Graduation Cap Sugar Cookie Shots!!

It's grad season! Take a shot (and eat it too!)

Ok, so I am SUPER excited to tell you about this one. This is an idea I had when I was thinking about something special I could make for my sister, who (like all seniors this year) couldn't have a real undergrad ceremony. So, after a bit of brainstorming and considering her favorite foods (which is basically all things coffee, if that counts as a favorite "food"), I came up with grad cap sugar cookie shots filled with spiked iced coffee! Yes, spiked iced coffee.

The Cookies

There are two elements to the cookies: the shot glass and the top of the cap. To make the shot glass, I wanted to use something that would look similar enough to the base of a grad cap but still be round enough to hold a drink. Mini muffin pans seemed the way to go, which was a major plus since I don't own a shot glass mold anyways. I researched a few cookie shot and cookie cup recipes and found that any cookie dough should work, so I used a standard sugar cookie recipe and dyed it a soft blue (since that's my sister's school's color- use you schools colors if you make these!). I rolled up the dough and let it firm up in the fridge for about a day, but you can really just give it 30 minutes to an hour in the fridge if you're in more of a time crunch.

To make the shot glasses:

1. Divide the cookie dough in half; use one half for the cups and leave the other wrapped in the fridge.

2. Take a mini muffin tin and fill it will a small ball of cookie dough.

3. Use the bottom of a shot gloss to press down the dough so that it forms a little cup in each muffin space.

4. Bake for 10 minutes at 350 °F.

5. Remove from the oven and press each cookie down again with the bottom of a shot glass (which should deflate the cookie, making a divot in each one to form a nice cup shape).

6. Bake for 1 more minute.

7. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes before removing to cool completely.

To make the top of the cookie:

1. Remove the other half of the cookie dough from the fridge and flatten it out into a square.

2. Using a square cookie mold or a knife, cut out an equal amount of squares to cups you made. The squares should be bigger than the cups (remember, you're trying to make the top of a grad cap!)

3. Bake for 8-10 minutes at 350 °F on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

4. Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from the sheet to cool completely on a wire rack (or just let them cool completely on the parchment paper off the sheet if you don't have a wire rack).

Since I am an experimental baker, I do not expect all bakes to go 100% as planned... and this one did not. The sugar cookies spread A LOT and did not really firm up after baking and cooling, and I ended up cutting them into squares post-baking and putting a couple back in the oven in a make-shift aluminum foil square mold to prevent it from spreading. It could just be the recipe I used, but it's still useful to keep this in mind when you make the tops of the grad caps! I ended up getting 7 squares, so I had a bunch of "topless" cookie shots, but a couple of extra shots isn't the end of the world!

Cookie Assembly

Time to make some grad caps!!!

1. Melt some chocolate (your choice- I did semisweet) in the microwave or over a double boiler.

2. Fill each cookie shot with melted chocolate and pour out all remaining chocolate, leaving each cookie shot face down to dry (you want a really thin chocolate coating).

3. After the cookie shots have completely dried, put some melted chocolate on the bottom of each cookie shot and place a square on top of each (it shout look like a little grad cap at this point).

4. Let the chocolate completely cool so that both cookie parts adhere to one another.

Aaaaaaaand you've got yourself a sugar cookie grad cap shot glass!

You can optionally further decorate your grad caps as you'd like- I topped mine with some icing and sprinkled edible blue sugar glitter on top of each.

If you have any leftover "topless" cookie shots, you can decorate those too! I dipped the rims of each of them in blue icing and then edible blue sugar glitter and let them cool with the finished grad caps until completely dry.

The Spiked Iced Coffee

Of course, spiking is completely optional- you can fill these will regular iced coffee or any drink of choice!

My sister loves iced coffee, which is why I chose it as the drink for this recipe, but chocolate milk or even cereal milk would both be really cool (and delicious) options. I made a regular iced coffee and added a bit of whipped cream flavored Smirnoff. It was delicious!! However, any rum, whiskey or bourbon should do the trick too. You can also use some Baileys or Kahlua if you have that on hand, or any flavored liquors or vodkas.

Now there's one thing left to do...