Note: These are not part of the healthy eating plan.
Taking a lesson from the Lisa McD playbook, I used gel food coloring to get the dough vibrant basketball orange. Considering how the color seemed to get on everything in the kitchen nothing is permanently orange. Part of the fun of cooking is making a big mess. By making the dough orange I didn't need to frost the cookies - a huge time saver. Seattle Karen recommended the coloring, she uses it for cake decorating. The hues are very vibrant and the gel is really easy to use. (I used Chefmaster Liqua-Gel in Sunset Orange #5036.)
I looked up some basketball pix on the Internet and then used melted chocolate in a piping bag with a small writing tip to make the lines.
My first tray of cookies had gloppy points where I started and stopped the piping. On the second tray I left enough room in between each cookie so I could start and stop the piping on the tray and not the cookie, this really cleaned up the lines.
I really wanted to make basketball orange fortune cookies with the fortune containing all in info to join in the tournament. Once I started looking at how to actually make fortune cookies I quickly changed my mind. You have to bake them in batches of 2-6 cookies because each one has be be shaped as it comes out of the oven. That is almost as crazy as applying dragees (decorative sugar balls) by tweezer!
