For the Love of Cookies

This cute set was made after a tutorial from Shirlyn (you can find her info here). I consider this an advanced project, in which consistency of the Royal icing must be as close to perfect as possible. You will also need to make Royal icing transfers with quite a bit of detail, and finally use diluted gel dye to do shading on the transfers and the fully set icing. It is a labor of love, but as usual, I learned a lot from my boo-boos.

There they are, four little guys, one pretty happy with his huge beer… Judging by his smile, it was not his first! The cookies have many details that make them shine. Below I go through some of the steps to make them, all very well-explained in her video tutorials. It all starts with making the transfers and allowing them to set overnight. The basic design is added to each cookie (I used a mini-projector for that), and icing in 5 colors is prepared, each in the correct consistency for the job. Shirlyn uses a single consistency for piping and flooding, and that is the way to get more lift on the icing, but it requires quite a bit of skill to ensure a smooth surface. My icing was perhaps a little too thick in some cases.

The trickiest part for me were the hands. Shirlyn makes perfect fingers, I just could not do it like hers, but maybe next time it will be better. It is the kind details that requires the icing to be EXACTLY right. Mine was too thick, I diluted a bit and it got too thin right away. But I know people who get the cookies won’t be inspecting each little component of it.

My favorite guy is this one, I just adore all the little details!

Online cookie tutorials are a great way to improve your cookie skills, and I love that I can just have the videos available whenever is most convenient for me. If you don’t own the cookie cutters, you can always cut by hand using the images she provides. Just make sure your rolled out dough is VERY cold, preferably frozen and removed from the freezer for 5 minutes to get it just right.

ONE YEAR AGO: Tunde’s Needlepoint Cookies, Two Ways