Decorating Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing (Post #5- Penguin Cookies): Working with Fondant

Claire Andreski
Period 5
1/28/18

Hi everyone! I can not believe that I am already writing my final blog post! I enjoyed learning more about cookie decorating through this blog and I especially enjoyed making this last batch of cookies. So keep reading if you'd like to see some really cute penguin cookies I made! I would highly recommend them! :)

So for this final batch of cookies, I made sugar cookies the same way as usual, but used a large penguin cookie cutter from Sur La Table to achieve the desired shape.

Some of the penguin cookies after finished with baking.

I baked the cookies until golden brown and let them cool down. While they were cooling, I made a batch of royal icing. With this I created black piping icing, black flooding icing, orange piping icing, and left some white icing which I divided into both piping and flooding icing. Overall, it wasn't to hard to make the frosting, as there were only 3 colors, but one of the challenges of this specific design was creating the black icing. Below are some pictures of the process of creating the black icing. I found that I definitely needed to add more food coloring than I expected, otherwise it looked gray. In correlation with that, I also found out that it helps to have very pigmented food colorings/gels and specifically a black color. Luckily, I had black food coloring, but I think it would be next to impossible to create a deep black if you only had primary colors, unfortunately. Below is the process of how I got my icing to be black if you are interested.

                             

First, I added one to two drops of black food coloring, but I was unsatisfied with the result I got, which was a gray color. I added another drop or two to the frosting and the color deepened and looked closer to what I wanted. I added one more drop and the frosting became the color I desired. :) 

Once all the frosting was colored, I began to pipe the actual design. First, I outlined the bellies of the penguins with white piping icing, then I outlined the whole body of the penguins with black piping icing. 

In the first two pictures, you can see the penguins' white outlines and in the bottom two pictures you can see the full outline in black on the penguin cookies. After these steps were completed, I went on to fill in both outlines with flooding icing. 

Then, I piped on the eyes once the icing had set a bit. The book instructed, "Using white and black icing, pipe a small eye on each penguin" (Hession 146). I tried to follow these instructions and I think I did a pretty good job. I made the eyes a little bigger than the book by accident, but I think it made the cookies look even cuter. :) 

At first, the penguins looked creepy with just the white piped on their eyes. Once I added the pupils, they looked cute.

A penguin with its eye piped on- I think it turned out really cute!

After this, I used the orange piping to add on a few details, which were the feet and the beak. I piped a triangle for the beak and did three dots to represent each foot. After that, it was on to learning a new technique, working with fondant! 

This is a picture of me piping with the orange icing.

I purchased a box of Wilton fondant in the white color from my local Safeway for $7.99. This seemed to be a bit expensive, but once I opened the box up, there was actually a lot of fondant. 

This is the Wilton fondant that I used for this purchase.

Once I took the fondant out of the package, I took off a large piece and rolled it into a ball, then regarded the book on how to proceed. The author stated in a subsection called "Working with Fondant" that, "Because of its sticky nature, fondant should be rolled out on a surface lightly dusted with cornstarch" (Hession 30). I dusted my work surface then read the book on how to color the fondant. On page 30 as well, the author described that you should add a small amount of coloring to start off with, just like you would to color royal icing, then knead the fondant like dough (Hession 30). I followed these directions, deciding to dye my fondant red. Overall, it went well, but you need to be very careful to not dye your hands. Unfortunately, I didn't follow the author's warning to "Wear disposable gloves or your hands will be the same color as the fondant" (Hession 30). You should definitely heed this advice because I stained my hands red when I didn't wear gloves.

 

Above are the stages of mixing the red food coloring into the fondant. In the bottom left picture you can see that I stained my hands a lot by not wearing gloves and I highly regret not wearing disposable gloves. 

After coloring the fondant, I decided to make the fondant scarves and earmuffs that the books showed me how to do. For the scarf, I rolled a "snake" and split it into two parts using a butter knife, with one being slightly shorter than the other. I then attached the smaller section around the neck of the penguin cookie, then draped the longer one down the side of the penguin cookie. After that, I created a pattern on the bottom to look like the fringe of the scarf. I attached it and then I was done! 

                        

For the earmuffs, I rolled out a small ball of red fondant and flattened it and then rolled a very short rope, then attached the rope and pressed the ball onto the rope so that they would stay on. Then the earmuffs were finished!

After that I was finished with the whole batch! Overall, I really enjoy the way the fondant looks and how you can work with it. It is almost like when you used to play with PlayDoh when you were a little kid! However, the taste of the fondant was not my favorite. It was kind of strange and a hard taste to describe. It looks nice overall, but I wouldn't recommend using a ton of it if you are going for a really great tasting cookie versus a great looking cookie. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this whole project and I think that I improved my baking and decorating skills greatly!

My final questions for you are, have you ever worked with fondant? Do you think that you'd ever decorate cookies with royal icing? Do you like how these cookies turned out? 

Citation: Hession, Julie Ann. 100 Best Decorated Cookies: Featuring 750 Step-by-Step Photos. Robert Rose, 2013.

Betty Crocker - How to Make Perfect Molded Cookies

For my last post I decided to make Russian tea cakes. The tips on page 23 said to make the dough as the recipe directed, chill if needed, roll into balls between the palms of hands, bake as balls or flatten with bottom of glass or fork and to take your time and mold the cookies carefully.

I started off making the dough which was a fairly simple dough, similar to my last post except with less flour. I then rolled out the cookies in 1 inch balls. This was probably the longest process of making these cookies. Once they were all on the pan I baked them in the oven at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes.

The second longest process was rolling all 27 cookies in powdered sugar while they were still warm. I tried many different techniques when rolling them in the sugar many of which failed. I might have done something wrong but the cookies in the picture seemed to have a nice even coat of powdered sugar and mine had a sticky film around them instead. I gave up on trying different techniques and just rolled them in my hand in the powdered sugar.

I would not recommend this recipe unless you have a lot of time and patience, this is by far the messiest recipe I have tried. Powdered sugar gets everywhere and is very difficult to clean up and the cookies didn't really taste that good for the amount of effort I put into them.

Ingredients 

mixing butter sugar and vanilla

mixing flour and salt

fully mixed

after baking

The mess 

Finished product

Would you guys be willing to make these even though they are really messy?
If you would change anything what would you change or do different?

Betty Crocker - How to make the perfect rolled cookies

I made scotch shortbread for my fourth post. The directions told me to make the dough as directed and roll out part of the dough and chill the rest. I found that with the dough I made, the warmth didn't matter as much as other dough would have because of how crumbly it was.

It then said to lightly roll dough to desired thickness. I tries to do it as lightly as possible but every time I rolled out the dough it cracked everywhere, I compared it to a desert. I ended up squishing it together then squishing int down with my hands and a spatula.

I was supposed to dip the cookie cutter in flour so the dough didn't stick, which I did with the first 2 cookies, but then I realized it didn't make a difference whether I floured it or not. I ended up straying farther from the directions than I have in any of my posts. I did give up making the cookies after having to roll out the dough so many times so there was a bit of leftover dough.

If I do make this again, which I probably won't, I would maybe add a little bit of milk to make it not a crumbly mess. It was very frustrating making these cookies but I learned to exercise my patience and that cookies that take a lot of work sometimes don't taste amazing. The cookies were very bland and dry, probably needed to be dipped in something for them to taste better, like coffee or tea.

Ingredients

Mixing ingredients

Final dough

Cut out dough

baked

Final product

Betty Crocker Cooky Book - How to make the perfect refrigerator cookies

For my fourth post I make chocolate peppermint cookies. The cook book said to make the dough as recipe suggest, which I did. It also says to roll the dough into a cylinder with the diameter that the recipe suggests (Crocker pg 15).  I had trouble rolling the dough because neither the instructions or the tips told me how to roll it correctly. I ended up taking wax paper and putting the dough in it and rolling it out almost like a rolling pin.

I then chilled the dough in the fridge overnight. The tips on page 15 said to cut desired thickness but the cookies i made required the dough to be cut 1/8th of an inch to cook correctly. It was very difficult to cut the cookies the correct thickness because of how thin they needed to be. The tips on page 15 also say to use a very thin sharp knife. I had a thin knife but it wasn't very sharp which might be why I struggled with the thickness

After I baked them I made a mint frosting to put in between the cookies. I ended up burning a significant amount of the cookies so I had a lot of extra frosting.

Ingredients

Mixing the dough

After chilling in the fridge overnight

After i cut some of them

The frosting

The really burnt cookies

Finished product

If  I make these again I would watch them more carefully when they are in the oven and use a sharper knife.

If you made these would you cut them the right thickness or cut them thicker?
Would you try the flavors i tried or would you make different flavors?