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I love making baked goods for holidays. Cakes, cookies, breads; anything with sugar in it that I can decorate. I keep seeing cute sugar cookies decorated with royal icing on blogs that I enjoy reading. I’ve made royal icing one time and decorating was fun, but I didn’t try any fun techniques.
I started out by making sugar cookies early in the morning so that they would have plenty of time to cool before I iced them. I then took out my newly aquired food gel colors (thanks to Bake at 350 recommendation) and made my royal icing. I tinted it with pink, really red, bright white, and purple-perfect colors for Valentine’s Day.
The outlining of the cookies was the easy part. Flooding and then decorating was tougher. I made cookies with names on them, cookies with dots, cookies with stripes, and cookies with designs. I loved the outcome; they looked almost professional! I sent some to my little cousins, and served the others at a small gathering we had at our house.
White Sugar Cookies (adapted from Annie’s Eats)
12 T. butter
4 T. unsweetened applesauce
1 c. powdered sugar
1 egg, beaten
2 t. vanilla
1 t. salt
2 1/2 c. flour
1. Cream the butter and applesauce. Stir in the powdered sugar and mix until smooth. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and salt. Slowly stir in the flour.
2. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled.
3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
4. Remove dough from refrigerator. Sprinkle surface with flour and roll the dough to 1/4″ thick. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes or until the bottoms begin to brown.
5. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.
Royal Icing (adapted from Annie’s Eats)
4 c. powdered sugar
2 T. meringue powder
1 t. vanilla extract
6 T. water
1. Mix all ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix on low for 3-4 minutes or until everything is well incorporated.
2. Add water a few drops at a time until icing is still thick, but is able to be piped. Divide into several bowls, tint with coloring, put into piping bag, and pipe the outline of sugar cookies. Keep unused icing covered so it doesn’t dry out.
3. To make icing the correct consistency for flooding, add water until the icing runs off the back of a spoon. Flood cookies using a toothpick to spread the icing. Let dry for 30 minutes then pipe on decorations.
4. Allow decorated cookies to dry overnight so that the icing gets hard.
Makes about 40 decorate sugar cookies.
Those are just beautiful. You’ve got a great touch with decorating. Thanks for linking these up to Sweets for a Saturday. Don’t forget to come by and enter my giveaway for a $25 item of your choice from CSN. http://sweet-as-sugar-cookies.blogspot.com/2011/02/crunchy-nut-cookies-and-giveaway-you.html
You did such a nice job on the cookies! They look so pretty with the flooded icing!