Cookie Creation

Cami asked me how I made the cookies shown a couple of posts ago, so here's the scoop:

I got the idea for making these kind of cookies from a blog I happened upon one day: Bake at 350. I didn't post the link to her site in the original post because, well, her cookies are incredibly prettier than mine were and I didn't want to be upstaged. :) But seriously, check out her website, her cookies are so gorgeous you'd never want to actually eat them. The recipe for the sugar cookies itself is under the label "Livestrong" and there are multiple posts that detail her techniques for decorating. Basically, the frosting is royal icing, which is made with sifted powdered sugar, water, and meringue powder (the magic ingredient, and inside which you'll find the recipe for the icing). The icing dries hard, so the cookies can be stacked and handled and such. I used Wilton food coloring gel to color it and outlined the designs by using piping bags. To fill in the color and make the designs in the cookies, like the dots and swirls,
all you do is water down the icing to syrup consistency, let it sit for a minute to get bubbles out, and pour it into a squeeze bottle. When squeezed on, the icing will spread (helped by a toothpick) to the edges of the outline. While it's wet, you can squeeze dots on, or do lines and then run the toothpick up and down the lines to create the cool swirly. After hardening overnight, I wrote on them with food coloring pen. And if you put a slice of bread in the container with the cookies, they'll be soft as buttah.

Now, when I told Mike that I found a new hobby, and that hobby was cookie decorating, his response was, "You're turning cookie decorating into a hobby?" Yes. This much work must necessitate hobby status, and obviously is not just for the purpose of whipping up a batch of cookies. It's time consuming, but I really enjoyed it, and look forward to trying it again (hopefully with a steadier hand and cleaner lines) and it really wasn't that hard even the first time around, even for someone as artistically inept as myself.