Watermelon Sugar Cookies

Jennifer S.

Sugar Cookie Dough
2/3 cup shortening
2/3 cup butter
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
You will also need:
Red and green food coloring
chocolate chips (two per cookie of the "standard" size chips or more if using mini-chips)

Make dough according to directions:
In a medium bowl, cream together the butter, shortening and sugar. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt, stir into the creamed mixture until dough comes together.

Divide dough into half, then divide one of the halves into half. You should have 3 batches of dough now. Your largest batch of dough needs to be colored with red food coloring. I used 8-10 drops of liquid food coloring to get the color that I wanted. With one of the smaller batches of dough color it green. I used 8 drops of green to get the color I wanted. Leave the third batch plain (white).

Roll the red dough into a log, and set aside. Roll out the white dough into a large rectangle, it needs to only be long and wide enough to cover the outside of the red dough. Roll up the red log of dough in the white dough. Now roll out the green dough into a large rectangle to roll up the red/white dough.
**Note you may need to use a little flour along the way to keep your dough from sticking to the counter and rolling pin. I used on of those flexible cutting boards to help me wrap mine around the rest of the dough.

You should now have a large log of dough with the red on the inside, covered with the white then covered with the green dough. Wrap the entire thing up in plastic wrap and place in the freezer for about 1-3 hours on a cookie sheet.

When ready to bake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Remove plastic wrap from sugar cookie dough log. Slice the dough into 1/4" slices and place 2" apart on an unprepared cookie sheet. Place two chocolate chips "point side" down into the dough (see picture) so that the smooth bottoms are facing up. These are your seeds.
Bake cookies 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven, until bottom is light brown. Let cookies cool for 10 minutes on cookie sheets then cool on wire racks.