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This month Sally challenged all of us to make sugar cookies decorated with royal icing. I am a fan of royal icing for my sugar cookies and made some last year, so I was ready to try to improve on my earlier attempts.

I began by making Sally’s recipe for the sugar cookies. This is a really straight forward dough and easy to work with, not to mention tasty. I rolled out the sheets and refrigerated them for a day, then used 9 different cutters to punch out the shapes.

The cookies were baked off, cooled and stored for another full day. Here is were I made a crucial decision. I used pre made royal icing from a baking supply store. I should have stuck with Sally’s royal icing recipe as it tastes better! The pre made icing looks great, was easy to work with but has more of a sticky, marshmallow consistency that we don’t really like.

But, I learned a valuable lesson and won’t do it again! Sorry Sally.

Once I got the premix to the right consistency, I began the outlining and flooding of the cookies.

There was some planning that has to go into this as the icing needs to dry before detail work can begin. Also, I decided to do some cookies with the wet-on-wet technique so those had to be handled quickly in order to prevent the icing from drying. I had to have a plan in place before I started!

I gathered all my decorations and mixed several colors of icing.

Then set to work! The snowflakes, snowmen, trees, bells, stockings, candy canes and lights were flooded and allowed to set to for one day so that I could add detail later.

The mittens and ornaments were flooded then other colors were added immediately. I used a straight pin to pull the colors together.

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A little colored sanding sugar and pearls finish them off.

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The verdict: I did ok. I think I did a better job with the wet-on-wet technique but I really suck at writing on the cookies! And, as I said before, I would not use this pre mix again. The consistency was a little too thick. I also will use only #1 or # 2 tips next time. The #5 was too wide and hard to control the flow of icing.

I had so much fun decorating these. I didn’t realize how many hours went into them until my hubby told me, apparently he was keeping track 🙂

I am not sure if Sally will be continuing this challenge series moving into 2018, but I hope she does as I have learned a lot and had so much fun challenging myself in the kitchen.

 

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52 thoughts on “Sally’s Baking Addiction, December Challenge: Iced Sugar Cookies”

  4. OMG I came by to drool over your creations but these are truly amazing and look too good to eat!! I love, love, love the pearl scarf on the snowman(?) of is it a snowwoman (?)…I think they all look fantastic…I love how you connected the hearts together too. Sincerely these are very impressive and beautiful! 🙂

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  12. This is my favorite thing to do with my daughter every Christmas. The royal icing is so fun to work with, I just struggle with the patience required to allow for the icing to set before moving on to the next step. When I start a project, I want to finish it in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t like having to wait then come back and do more then wait some more….yadda yadda.

    But these treats are BEAUTIFUL. So…..maybe I can be a little more patient this year.

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  16. These are so cute! I think you did really well, and it’s obviously been a learning curve with making them too. I actually think the thick icing looks incredibly tempting, it’s so shiny and colourful… I want one now 😀
    Caz x

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