Bitten Gingerbread Men - Christmas Cookies

I was trolling Pinterest for decorated sugar cookie ideas for Christmas, and I found a gingerbread man with a bite taken out of its leg.  I know this sounds morbid, but it was so cute.  I immediately decided that the half-eaten gingerbread man was going to be my Holiday cookie.

Now my cookies don't look anywhere near as good as Sweet Sugarbelle's version, but hey, I'm just an cookie decorating hack and she is the artist.   You can see the master's cookies here.

So how did I make them?  Well I pretty much followed Sugarbelle's instructions with just a few changes.

I used my standard "No Fail Sugar Cookie Recipe", and cut out my gingerbread men.  Next I used an interesting looking pattern to take the "bite" out of the leg, arm or body.  I tried taking a bite out of the head, but that just looked to weird/sick.

Baked them next, and here they are right out of the oven. 

Onto the decorating...  I used my standard icing to dam, flood, and decorate the cookies.  It is a Corn Syrup Royal Icing.  It is nice for flooding and gives the dried icing a pretty shine, but it isn't the best for adding the details to the cookies.  Even at a stiff consistency it tends to be a little soft and runny, and doesn't hold points very well.  But I was in a rush and didn't have time to try out Sugarbelle's recommended icing.  Maybe next time...

Anyway to pipe the dam I used a Wilton Round #1 tip, and icing at a stiff consistency.  I get my tips from either Hobby Lobby or Michael's, and they cost about $1 each.  The icing is tinted with Wilton's Brown food color gel.  I usually dam 4-5 cookies in at a time, and after I finish the 4th I loop back around and start flooding the first.  I want to give the dam enough time to set, but not enough time for it to dry.  When I flood I push the flood icing on top of the dam so they both merge into one seamless surface.

For flooding I used a Wilton Round #3 tip.  I pipe the flooding icing about 1/4 inch away from the previously piped dam, and then I use an offset spatula to push the flood icing on top of the dam.  The flood icing will float over the dam, but "hopefully" won't spill over it. 

As a final step I smooth out any air bubble that float to the surface.  I let the base icing dry for 24 hours before I start the detail decorating process.

After the base is dry, I piped on some cheeks with pink tinted icing, and some faces with black.

Next I piped on a little bow tie.  Sugarbelle used a Wilton Leaf tip #67, but even at the stiff consistency my icing wouldn't hold the leaf shape so I just made a flat bow tie shape.  For the center of the tie I just used some preformed circular sugar sprinkles from Wilton.

Final touches included the orange nose and buttons, and the white lines around the head and arms (all tip #1).  In hindsight I should have used a #2 tip for the white lines; they needed to be a little thicker.

So a cute little cookies that weren't too stressful or time consuming to make.  And while they don't looks as good as Sugarbelle's they are pretty good for me.



Happy Decorating,

Carol

Snuggling Lovebirds - Engagement Party Cookies

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I needed to make some cookies for a friend's engagement party, and I saw these precious little snuggling Lovebird cookies.  They didn't look too complicated, so I decided to give them a try.

Now I'm not an experienced cookie decorator, so it was a painstaking and time-consuming task for me...

I used Toba Garrett's Glace Icing (Royal Icing with equal parts milk and corn syrup) as described in her book Creative Cookies, and I used Wilton Icing Gel for the teal color, and AmeriColor gel for the bright white and black.

 In this closeup you can see that the teal blue flooding glaze is a little splotchy.  I actually made these ahead of time and froze them.  The freezing worked great except for the splotchy-ness of the blue.  I don't know if the problem was the type of glaze used (corn syrup), the thin, flooding consistency of the glaze, or the type of color (Wilton).  I will have to do some experimenting to find out what is causing the problem.

But the splotchy blue was not that noticeable so I kept decorating.  Pink cheeks, brown branch, orange nose and tiny orange toes.  All of these were colored using Wilton gels. 

And after a few grueling hours ;-) I managed to churn out eight cookies.  But they still looked a little plain. 

So I took some little fondant flower I had made for some other cookies and gave the bride dove a little bouquet.  Now that looks better.

I just hope the bride-to-be likes them.  But hey, what's not to like about snuggling lovebirds?

Happy Decorating,

Carol

Fried Egg and Bacon - Cookies!

WOW it has been a while since I posted.

I've still been baking and attempting to decorate, but "life" has all but eliminated my blogging time. But I started a new (less stressful) job a few weeks ago, so hopefully I will have more time to post my successes and failures.

Here are some cookies I baked for Thanksgiving. Not very traditional I know but I saw them at a work luncheon and I had to give them a try....

The egg portion is sugar cookie and the bacon is pretzel sticks. Too cute. Or at least I thought so.

The yoke was the most difficult part to make. I made flattened balls of cookie dough and after baking I dipped them in yellow-orange icing and allowed them to dry. I then used a little icing to glue the yokes to the main cookie and then flooded the main cookie with white icing.

And voila... A sure fire way to get your kids to eat eggs!!!

Duck Sugar Cookies

At the last minute a friend asked me to make some cookies for a baby shower. I frantically dug through my box of cookie cutters and couldn’t find one “baby” related cutter. WHAT!!!! I didn’t realize my collection was so deficient.

In the end I had to settle for an Easter Duck cutter that I thought looked a little baby-ish.

Not too bad...



They don’t scream “baby shower”, but the mother to-be didn’t seem to mind.

TWD: Sables

I wanted to catch up on some TWD assignments that I had skipped for one reason or another, so yesterday I baked a batch of Sables (page 131-133 of Dorie Greenspan: Baking From My Home To Yours).

Can I say WOW!

Sables, oh Sables where have you been hiding all my life? Buttery, crumbly, and melt in your mouth good. These little gems were a cross between shortbread and sugar cookies and for added oomph they were encrusted in crunchy grains of coarse sugar. Delicious.

My pictures don't the cookies justice, but believe me they tasted amazing. I devoured/inhaled five cookies in less than two minutes. Yikes, a minute on the lips, a life time on the hips.

The cookies were really easy to mix. Just lightly blend the butter and sugars, and then add the egg yolks.


Next dump the flour in all at once, and mix just until incorporated. According to Dorie, the secret to light, crumbly Sables is not to over mix the flour.


Roll the dough into a log and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. I left mine in the refrigerator overnight and the log was as hard as a brick when I took it out. Brush the log with whisked egg yolk, which acts like glue, and then coat with coarse sugar.


Slice the log into 1/3 inch cookies and bake on a parchment or silicone lined baking sheets for 17-20 minutes at 350 degrees F.


I only baked my cookies for 14 minutes and I had a problem with the edges of the cookies browning too much.


I also noticed that on some of the cookies, the decorating sugar slid off as the cookies baked. I think I used too much egg wash, and, yuck, the pure yolk gule left a yellow film on the side of the cookies that was still visible even after baking. Next time I'll use a milk wash instead of yolks, and I'll squish the coarse sugar firmly into the side of the dough log. I'll also lower the oven temperature to 325, and bake on a baker's stone instead of a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Hopefully I can get the outside of the cookies to look as perfect as the inside tastes.

Brown Sugar Butter Buttons

A beautiful photo on FoodGawker lead me to a posting by Tongue-N-Cheeky for Brown Sugar Butter Buttons. The cookies looked so cute and cheeky that I decided to give them a try.

The dough came together beautifully…

And the cookies baked up without any problems.

Tongue-N-Cheeky said that the Butter Buttons baked up flakey and surprisingly hollow. I was dying to see the hollow center so as soon as they were out of the oven I cracked one open. But instead of a hollow center I found an ooey, gooey mess.


Sad and dejected (I wanted hollow cookies) I abandoned the baking sheet of failed Butter Buttons and went on to making my next holiday treat. A few hours later I picked up a Button, broke it open, and prepared to photo document my failure. But instead of a gooey mess, I found a perfectly hollow cookie. Amazing. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. Somehow in the cooling process the inside of the cookie shrank and a cavern formed in the center.


Isn’t baking a strange and wondrous thing? If anyone can explain the physics/chemistry of how the cavern forms in the cookie I would appreciate it.

As far as the taste, well honestly, I didn’t care for them much. The cookie was ultra sweet and very crisp. I don’t think I’ll make them again, but I sure would like to know how that hollow center formed.

The Best Sugar Cookies - EVER

These cookies don't look like much, but they are the best tasting sugar cookies - EVER. I know, I know, you have heard that a million times, but these sugar cookies are really are that good. Slightly crunchy on the outside and soft and cake-like on the inside. Yummm… And the best part is -- they come from a box so they are quick and easy make.


Click HERE for the recipe.

I hope you like them as much as I do.

Empire Cookies

I stumbled across a blog called The Canadian Baker and after one glance my heart started to thump and drool puddled in my mouth. Empire Cookies. What was this??? Raspberry jam sandwiched between two crisp sugar cookies and topped with almond glaze and candied cherries. Yummm….


I immediately revised my mental "Baking To Do" list and placed Empire Cookies in the number one slot. How had this delightful little cookie escaped my notice all these years? I couldn't wait for the weekend so I could bake up a batch and see if they tasted as good as they looked (oh please, please, please……).

Well they DID!!!! (Taste as good as it looked, that is.)

The dough was a breeze to mix up, and the rolling and cutting went fine. I did have to add a little more flour to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin (stupid New Orleans humidity), but the added flour didn't affect the overall taste at all. Baking was a snap too. 10 minutes exactly. The cookies didn't spread, so you can pile a bunch on your cookie tray. Less oven time, less clean-up time, and more cookie munching time.

To ice the cookies I borrowed a tip from a reviewer on RecipeZaar and thinned the icing more that the recipe directs. Then just dip the cookie into the icing rather than spreading it. Dip, swirl, next, dip, swirl, next. Assembly line quick and it gives you a super smooth finish to the dried icing.


To finish off the cookie, the recipe (and British tradition) calls for a candied cherry to be placed on top. I was all out of candied cherries (ha, ha, ha), so I put the kid's gummy fruit on top. Is that tacky? I'm sure The Queen would not approve. I guess I'll have to call them Trailer Park Cookies rather than Empire Cookies.