Sunday Sweets - Adventures in Icing

The delightful Ina Garten has inspired me to decorate cookies...
Beautiful cookies...

I used the following recipe for the cookies:

4oz very soft butter
6oz caster sugar
1 egg
1/3 tbsp vanilla extract
8oz plain flour
2/3 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Beat the sugar and butter together until well combined, and light and fluffy. Then beat it a bit longer. Just for fun.
Mix in the egg, then the vanilla.
Sift the dry ingredients together over the bowl. Mix to form a loose dough.
Form into a ball, wrap in cling film and chill for a couple of hours.

When firm, roll out on to a VERY WELL floured surface. If you think there's just enough flour on there, sprinkle a bit more on... this is a soft dough and will stick like billy-o.
Dip the cookie cutters into flour before pressing out the shapes.
Line baking trays with a non-stick sheet, and lay out the cookies.
(You can refrigerate again at this point. This stops the cookies from spreading in the oven, and it also means you can get some of the prep done the day before if you need to)
Place into a pre-heated oven (temp 180oC) until lightly golden brown.
When cooked lay them onto a rack to cool completely before icing.

 

 

Making the icing - use Royal Icing for this, it contains egg whites so sets beautifully hard and shiny. You could make it from scratch using icing sugar and raw egg whites, or you can cheat and use the boxed Royal Icing, which is so much easier!

Mix the icing with enough water to make a very thick, but still runny paste. This is about 125g icing sugar to 35ml water and a splash of lemon juice. The consistency you need here is runny enough to drip off the spoon in ribbons, but firm enough that the ribbons remain on the surface of the icing (you can just see that in the photo below, these were still here after about a minute)

 

To colour the mix I've used either colouring gel (this is newish to supermarkets - I used this one.) or regular food colouring (though I don't like these nasty natural food colourings. They all seem quite brown. I miss the vivid and the E-numbers!)

I divided the icing into two bowls, and added 3 drops of red to one to create a pale pink, and three drops of red and 3 of blue to make purple. (My supermarket doesn't stock lovely violet...)

It is purple, honest!

This here's my first ever attempt at icing a border on a cookie. 

I've used a sandwich bag, and filled one corner with icing. Twist the top of the bag to secure, and squeeze the icing to the bottom of the bag. Trim a TINY (and I mean tiny) point off the bag and start to outline the cookie. The first corner I trimmed was small. But as you can see, not small enough! I got better at it!

Squeeze the bag with a constant pressure, don't drag the icing, but allow it to drop onto the surface.

This isn't quick, and it's not all that fun. Especially when your hands are shaking.

Leave the outline to set for about 5 minutes - when it's dry to the touch you can flood the centre. The icing used to flood is much runnier than the outline icing. This can be spooned in - but don't make it too runny or you can control it. You can use a paintbrush (preferably a clean one!) to manipulate the icing into all the edges. I used an icing stick.

Leave this to set completely if you plan to decorate on the top. This takes hours to go really hard.

 

These were decorated with the outline consistency icing. 

 

As you can see, I had a great time!

 I also made the lines thinner.

They're not knickers!

Really.  Not knickers.

Honestly. Not knickers.

Can you tell what it is yet?

I may have got a little carried away.

 

Tee hee! It's Cookie-Man!

See? Not knickers!

 These were made by adding drops of icing to the flooded parts before it had set. This gives a smooth finish with no bumpy outlines. You can drag a cocktail stick through it for a feathering effect.