Period 5
Post #2
Hi everyone! I'm back again with another post about using royal icing to decorate sugar cookies. :) I was pretty happy with how my first batch turned out (you can see the results in my first post) and so I decided to try again with a different theme, cookie shape, and skill. I decided to make cookies for Thanksgiving and I think that they were a huge success! I was very glad to hear that the guests enjoyed them and I think the design turned out pretty well too. :) Continue reading to see the pumpkin cookies I created!
I decided to go a little simpler, shape wise, from the last cookies because I had only 2-3 hours before we needed to leave to go to my aunt's house for Thanksgiving. I used skills learned from my previous post, such as the outline and flood method, but expanded my knowledge of piping details on top of other layers of frosting. First, I made the same cookie dough recipe (leaving out the almond extract), cut the dough out with a pumpkin cookie cutter and baked the cookies, making sure to bake the exact time the book specified to ensure fully cooked cookies that weren't so dry. I then made another batch of royal icing and divided that into 3 bowls. In one bowl I made thick orange frosting, in another I dyed the frosting the same color making sure to thin it out more (this was the flooding icing), and in a third I dyed the piping (thick) icing brown for the little stems I piped on at the end. Then I put the icings in pastry (piping) bags and began decorating. I first outlined all the pumpkin shapes with the orange, piping icing.
One of the pumpkin cookies outlined with orange, piping icing.
Then I proceeded to flood all the pumpkin cookies with the thinned out (flooding) icing that was orange. I used a toothpick as a tool to help me spread the icing in an even layer.
Flooding a pumpkin cookie- using a toothpick was very helpful!
Pumpkin cookies that had been outlined and flooded had to dry before other details could be added.
Then, once I was finished piping and flooding, I went back to the cookies that had first been frosted because they had dried and began to pipe the details according to the book. Hession stated, "Transfer reserved orange icing to a pastry bag fitted with a #2 tip. Pipe a border around each pumpkin. Pipe 2 curved lines on each side of center on each pumpkin, as shown" (Hession 79). These directions were helpful, but I think that her pictures illustrated her point even better, so I regarded the pictures as I piped the curved lines on top of the pumpkin cookies.
Piping the lines on top of the pumpkin cookies.
I went down each row of cookies on the cookie rack, completing the piping of the curved lines to give the pumpkins their distinct shape. After that, I piped the brown icing in a rectangle for the stems and I was done! :)
A picture of the finished pumpkin cookies.
I found that these cookies took a lot shorter time to decorate than the French cookies, partially because the number of cookies was fewer, but also because using the sort of assembly line production method Julie Ann Hession recommended in her book really made the process go by faster. She discussed how doing a whole cookie at a time slows your whole process down and that it is of course fine to decorate one part of all the cookies one cookie after the other (Hession 34). I definitely took this to heart and reaped the benefits! In terms of technique, you can definitely see that some of the lines were wobbly, but I learned that applying even pressure to the piping bag, not putting the tip too close to or far away from the surface of the cookie, and making sure the cookies had fully dried were all crucial to the clean, desired look. As I piped more and more, the lines began to look better and I think that I could pipe other curved or straight lines on future cookies better now because of this practice I got. According to my book, this type of piping is called "detail work", specifically wet-on-dry detailing, which Hession discussed in a section of the book called, "Wet-on-Dry Detailing". She stated that, "Detail work adds another layer of texture to a cookie when more icing is piped on top of icing that has already set" (Hession 28). This is definitely true and gives a very pleasant, almost 3D look to the cookies. I would highly recommend this method if you want to decorate cookies that are an object with a unique texture in real life!
Would you try this royal icing technique on cookies? Have you ever made cookies with a similar "3D" effect? What desserts did you have at Thanksgiving?
Citation: Hession, Julie Ann. 100 Best Decorated Cookies: Featuring 750 Step-by-Step Photos. Robert Rose, 2013.
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