Adventures in Baking: Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

Another baking adventure under my belt! I’ve been dying to share these with you, but wanted to wait until I had officially “sent them out” to show you all my creation! Being on this high protein plan has me hankering for baked goods on the weekend and I figured what better time to try decorated cookies than now!

When I was younger my mom always made her delicious sugar cookie recipe (at Easter, Christmas, and sometimes just for fun) and would give my sister and me the job of decorating (even though she still decorated a few herself that always turned out quite beautifully). Look – here I am as just a young child honing my baked goods decorating skills (albeit not on cookies, instead Easter egg cakes, but decorating none the less).

Anyway, I decided on the sugar cookies because to me they are the perfect springtime, light dessert option. I actually ended up going with a lemon, butter sugar cookie recipe and decorated the spring flowers like beautiful, colorful poppies (I got the idea from MS herself). I think they really turned out beautifully for my real “first” attempt at semi-professional looking decorated sugar cookies. So let me show you what I did…

First I broke out the lemon. I know some people aren’t big fans of citrus in their desserts, but I am all about the light and fresh taste of lemons. In fact, if I could have gone back and changed the way that I put this recipe together I would have probably added even more lemon zest and still more lemon juice. BUT in order to have the cookies actually work out I followed the recipe to a ‘T’. The ingredients and the process is actually SUPER easy; Two sticks of butter (yes please!), powdered sugar (or confectioners’ sugar for all of you super baking people), lemon juice, lemon zest, a little bit of salt and flour. SO easy.

The “hard” part of this recipe really starts when you have to chill the dough, roll it out and cut the cookies. You have to chill the cookie dough for AT LEAST two hours. In fact, even if you chill it for two hours it STILL gets warm when you start rolling it out so you have to work quickly and try your best to not handle the dough too much. I ended up re-chilling dough because it ended up being too warm to actually cut.

I went with two shapes of flower cookie cutters. Actually, I went with those two shapes because those are the only two flower cookie cutters that I have (thanks to a lovely wedding gift from one of my sister’s friends). They ended up being perfect though, and the cutter with the rounded “petals” matched up very closely to the cookie shape that I wanted.

Once you cut out the shapes you pop them into the oven for about 11 minutes and WAH LAH – beautiful, buttery, crisp edged, softer in the middle sugar cookies! The first batch I put in the oven I actually left in a little too long (even though I much prefer a darker, crisper cookie) for the average cookie-enjoyer. After that first batch though, I had the baking part down to a science and I achieved the perfect golden edges.

While I let the cookies thoroughly cool (this is the other “waiting game” part of this process…they must be COMPLETELY cooled before frosting!) I whipped up the frosting. I wanted to attempt to make actual royal icing cookies (never tried this before) because I wanted to play around with the “flooding” technique and also I wanted them to look like the picture which meant I needed to use this more advanced icing method.

I worked with the colors and they turned out JUST like I wanted them to; Beautiful, glossy icing colors! Finally the cookies had cooled and it was time to “trace” the shape of the cookies with the stiffer royal icing. At this point I figured I may as well stop – the cookies looked BEAUTIFUL with that simple outline of color, but I had so much icing left over and I was determined to make them magazine pretty.

After the “outline” of icing was completely dry I added some water to my icing colors and “got to flooding” the cookies. It was a learning process and by the end of the batch I figured out how to properly flood the cookies. Once the cookies were flooded (I left some with just the plain icing outline) I let them dry for a few minutes before adding the contrast color dots in the center. I used a toothpick to “pull or drag” the dots to the outside of the “petals”. It gave a great effect! Finally, I added the center to the “flowers” in the matching contrast dot color.

As the final step to these gorgeous cookies I sprinkled on the poppy seeds to mimic the look of real flowers! BEAUTIFUL!

I made about thirty of these fully decorated poppies in all different color combos but when there were fifteen cookies left I was too tired to make more. Dedicated baker here people! :) In order to clean up the icing out of the bowls (I had a ton of extra), I plopped it into the plastic bags I was using to decorate. I was planning to just throw these baggies out, but at the last minute, I thought it might be kind of neat to try and do a “marbleized” effect on the cookies that were yet to be decorated. I LOVED IT! So pretty and so fun! I added pink sugar crystals to some and white round sprinkles to the others. It’s fun to experiment with your baking and decorating because sometimes you get awesome results!

So I’ve officially conquered decorated sugar cookies. I think at some point I may just make the cookies…plain. They were so delicious! I decided to share my flower beauties with some of my favorite people. I hope they like them!

What do you gals think?! For my first attempt at cookies like this...I must say, I'm proud! :)