Cookie Practice

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!  Actually, it's not.  It's supposed to be 80 degrees the rest of this week!  It's October people!  Halloween is in a week!  I have vivid memories of all my childhood having a beautiful costume and having to wear a big, puffy heavy coat over it and no one got to see my gorgeous Belle costume which was the only one that I ever got from the Disney Store because the costumes there were expensive and I was the oldest so I never got anything new and pretty and the one time I did I have to cover it up with a pink Lands End jacket!!! 

Ok, I'm back from bitter childhood memory land.  In all actuality it didn't scar me really at all that I had to wear a jacket.  It was cold enough that I forgot everything except getting as much candy as possible and going home!

What am I posting about again?  Oh yeah, cookies.  Well I'm practicing decorating cookies.  Like actually decorating them not just frosting them.  I got the idea from the Pioneer Woman (big surprise there) but she featured a book from the woman who writes the blog Bake at 350.  She makes super cute cookies and as I was checking out her blog I got inspired to make my own cookies.  I tried that night actually.  I didn't have all the "good" materials so my icing colors weren't very bright but they were still semi-decent looking.

After that I broke down and ordered gel food coloring (used by students at the Culinary Institute of America),

All da  pwetty colors!

and meringue powder,

and disposable pastry bags (I only had one washable bag and I wanted to use multiple colors), and finally squeeze bottles.  (If you read the Bake at 350 blog, these are her essential tools).

So I baked up some cookies and tried her techniques.  Most essential concept is that there are two thicknesses of frosting, one is thick to use for outlining the cookies and adding eyes and such, and one is liquid so it fills in the cookie and dries smooth.

So I had to outline all three dozen cookies.  My hands HURT!  And I say "hands," plural, because I switched hands and it still didn't help.  But once they were all outlined I started to get creative with the liquid or "flood" icing!

I had three things of color I was working with.  I made one recipe of royal icing.  I split it in half and colored one half orange and one half black.  I then took the still stiff black icing, put it in a pastry bag, and outlined all the cookies.  I then took all the stiff black icing left and the stiff orange icing and slowly added water to the two bowls stirring until it reached a liquid consistency so that it falls off the spoon in a ribbon and smooths out in three seconds.  I took the two different colors of flood icing and put them in squeeze bottles and was ready to decorate!

Here I filled the whole cookie with orange icing.  Then I drew lines of black horizontally.  Finally I took a toothpick and went up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then . . . yes I'll stop.

Here I followed the same thought process  but instead of horizontal lines, I drew half circles starting from the corner and only drew the toothpick up, then up, then up, then . . . ok you get it.

Now this one was cool.  Fill the cookie with orange, then make a spiral of dots.  Now take a toothpick and start from the center and just draw it through all the dots in one continuous sweep.  It turns the dots into hearts!  So cute!

This kitty was filled in with black and horizontal orange stripes (up and down and up and lol)

This one was easy, fill with black icing and then just add orange dots!  

This one was my reference to a spider web.  Fill with black flood icing, draw concentric circles in orange starting from the center, then take a toothpick and draw lines from the center out all around.  I used leftover stiff black icing to add even more lines on top.  I didn't need to, I just did, and I overdid it.  I should have used the Chanel moto: whenever you're going out of the house, take stock of your accessories and take one thing off (or something like that).  Essentially Coco just meant that less is more, and I didn't follow that with this cookie and I should have.

 
Here I just used some stiff black icing to make fur.  Kinda funky.

Ah, nothing like yummy sugar cookies in the late afternoon sunlight :)

And since meringue frosting doesn't have that much flavor and we've decorated Christmas cookies with powdered sugar and water frosting forever and ever, I made a few with powdered sugar icing.  I did find that outlining the cookie with the stiff icing helped all the sugary goodness to stay on the cookie and not overflow the sides.

Sigh, that just means more hard work for me.  But it was worth it, I had fun decorating the cookies and I'm looking forward to Christmas where I can take all my new supplies and do some intense gingerbread cookies!  (Don't worry pictures will follow :) )

<3 B