sugar cookies & royal icing

About two weeks ago it was my co-worker, Meghan's, birthday. We had gone out for her birthday but I wanted to take treats to school for her to continue the celebration. Long story short, they were not that fabulous. The cookies... those were amazing. I have a family recipe that is exceptionally moist and overall delicious. However, the icing was a disaster. 

I follow several cookie blogs and I've watched countless video tutorials by those ladies. Compared to theirs, my icing was hard, cracky and pretty much just gross looking. I didn't know the trick about watering down your icing to flood it, so I was trying to spread piping icing with a knife. I ended up covering them in sanding sugar so that you could not see the awful mess that was below, but trust me, it was not pretty.

After that first try, I was discouraged but I really wanted to try again. So, that's exactly what I did this weekend. It was a long process, I made lots of mistakes, but I learned a lot along the way. I'll be starting a new batch today just in time for my sister and her husband's anniversary on Tuesday. For now, here's the process I did for the this weekend's batch...

1. I got all of my ingredients together for both the cookies and the icing, just to make sure I didn't need to go to the store.

2. On Friday afternoon, I made the cookie dough. It takes less than an hour from start to finish (including clean up).

3. After making the cookie dough, I split the dough in half and wrapped each half in plastic wrap. I put them in the refrigerator until I was ready to bake.

4. On Saturday afternoon, I got one of the halves of cookie dough out (I'm saving the other for the anniversary cookies) and began to roll it and cut out shapes. I floured my rolling pin for this process. I like my cookies extra thick, so I didn't get many cookies out of my dough. :)

5. I put the cookies on the cookie pan (covered in parchment paper) as I cut them out. I then put the entire cookie pan into the refrigerator for about an hour.

6. MISTAKE: I began making the royal icing while the cookies were in the refrigerator. Not a big deal, but I was so excited about putting the icing into the piping bag, that I did this too while the cookies were still in the refrigerator. NEXT TIME, I will wait to make the icing while the cookies are baking... and avoid putting it in the piping bag until the cookies are cooled and ready to ice.

7. I put the cookies in the oven.

8. After the cookies were finished baking, I moved them over to the table where I'd be decorating. I let them stay on the pan until they had the chance to cool a little and then I moved them to the cooling rack. If you move them too soon, they can break because they are too hot.

9. Once the cookies were completely cooled (in hindsight, I should have watched a movie or something... but you know with a new project you are always anxious to get to the final product), I piped icing around the edges. MISTAKE: My icing was WAY too hard at this point. I definitely should have added more water to the icing, but it was already in the piping bag and it was late at night.. I was not starting over at this point.

10. I then took some of the icing and watered it down to a thick honey/syrup consistency. I put it in a squeeze bottle and flooded the cookies (after the piping dried). I ended up cutting the tip on the squeeze bottle because I wanted more to flood at once... that's probably a personal preference.

11. I put the flooded cookies in the refrigerator for the night and went to sleep.

12. When I woke up this morning, I added a little bit of water to the piping icing (I did not want it to be as hard as it was yesterday). I also used a #4 tip (instead of a #2 that I used yesterday). I piped the edges and then whatever design I wanted to in the middle. My attempt was to put sanding sugar on just the wet design, but I think that because my cookies were cold, they held moisture and therefore the sanding sugar stuck to the "dry" flooded part as well.

At any rate, here is a picture of two of my cookies from this weekend (I was too anxious to get a blog post up that I did not want to wait for all of the cookies to dry so I couldn't stack them on each other)...

I will post more pictures as I learn how to do this form of art a little better. I encourage you to try something new today that will challenge you. Cookie decorating is a definite (exciting) challenge of mine. What will you try?!