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.