Pink Grapefruit Sandwich Cookies!

In an effort to keep up with blogging (a creative outlet for me) I decided to look at my pinterest boards today to see if anything on my food/recipe board jumped out begging for me to make it.  As luck has it I saw this page pinned.  I had a quick look at the ingredients and as soon as I realised I had all of them on hand I went for it.  The kids were occupied with toys so I was good for maybe 10-20 minutes ;)   Confections of a Foodie Bride is one of my favourite food blogs.  It just so happens that we have the same love of a good margarita and this wonderful blogger has many recipes for different margarita's, many of which I have pinned to make in the (hopefully near) future! 

Here is the juice of half of one of my giant Texas grapefruits :)

After zesting and juicing the grapefruit I combined the sugar, butter and part of the zest (saving a tablespoon for the cream filling).  Am I the only baker that never thinks about taking my butter out and letting it sit?  When I decide to bake something it's usually a spur of the moment type thing and I have to resort to softening my butter in the microwave.  I feel like such a slacker but it seems to soften up fine, unless of course I forget and end up with a melted buttery mess all over the microwave :/

While the sugar/butter/zest was mixing I blended the dry ingredients (Flour, cake flour, baking powder, salt) with a whisk.

When it was well blended I added the egg yolk and mixed it well.  Then I added half of the dry to the wet ingredients, which made it kind of dry but that was remedied by the 1/4 cup of fresh grapefruit juice that I added.  I finished it off with the remainder of the dry ingredients and it came together nicely.  It was a soft dough but SO simple and you could really smell the citrus-y goodness of the grapefruit.  I tipped it out onto plastic and wrapped it up and put it in the fridge.  If you look REALLY closely you can see some of the specks of zest.  Mmmmmmm!

While my cookie dough was in the fridge I got started on the cream filling.  First I mixed the powdered sugar, zest and butter (nuked again ;) ).

The instructions said to mix this on high for 3-4 minutes.  I found I had to keep it on medium to keep the sugar in the bowl and not all over my kitchen.  After a couple of minutes it came together though and was a very stiff consistency, that is when I added the grapefruit juice and it blended up so nicely.  The juice had some little bits of pulp that had sneaked in, so yummy.  There was an option to add food colouring, I opted to leave that out as it already had a nice pink hue to it and I prefer not to add colours if not necessary.  I think they are lovely just as they are but if you were using these for a themed party the food colouring could take them that extra step to make them more special. 

The consistency was perfect, firm but not too firm and again that beautiful aroma from the zest that made it smell fresh rather than sugary!

After the oven was preheated and the filling blended I took the dough out of the fridge (not sure if I gave it the full 30 minutes or not) and rolled it out.  Seeing the specks of zest made me happy, and the dough smelled divine!

I discovered that I don't actually own a 2 inch round cookie cutter.  I have PLENTY of shaped cutters and the closest I found was a flower shaped cutter.  It was the perfect size so I just went with it.  It made really cute little cookies.

I baked the cookies at 350 degrees for 8 minutes, any longer and I think they would have been over cooked.  They came out just right, not completely soft but not crunchy.  You could smell the citrus aroma when I opened the oven to pull them out.

I used a frosting gun (?) that I purchased in the Wilton section at Wal-Mart.  As you can see it has a bit of a crack in it from me tightening it too much but it still works fine.  A frosting bag is just as easy but because I have to pull out the couplers, bags and tips I usually get lazy and just grab this.  It worked well for the cookies.

This was the fun part, squishing them together and then trying to figure out the best way to photograph them.  I am a total amateur when it comes to photography of any kind and taking pictures of my food is helping me get a better idea but wow I have a long way to go.