Contaminated Cookies*

* This blog post involves a contagious disease…if you don’t want to catch it, don’t read this!

So I have been looking forward to this weekend for a while because it was my little peanut’s birthday! Those of you who have the pleasure of talking to me all the time, know that 99% of my conversation centers around how adorable/wonderful/fun/smart my baby cousin Andrew is! I was so excited to attend his 2^nd birthday party and see him play and have fun with all of his guests, but unfortunately life got in the way, and I got sick…with something contagious! So as to avoid the bad karma of getting 10 little kids sick (thank you to my lovely co-worker who came to work sick), I opted out of the party and laid in bed all day (which if you know me, you know what a challenge that is for me). As my mom pointed out: “Wow you can’t even bake, what are you going to do!?!”

Well I had already gotten my baking fix the night before. I had decided I would make sugar cookies in the shape of airplanes (that was the theme of his party) and the letter A (for Andrew of course) with royal icing decoration long before I got sick. I didn’t notice any symptoms last night and went about the process of baking and decorating the cookies. I used my family’s sugar cookie recipe, which reminds me of leaving cookies out for Santa! I bake them for less than the 12-15 minutes the recipe suggests because I like chewy cookies not crispy cookies, but it’s your preference. I used this illustrated royal icing recipe for two reasons: 1) it had a fairy and suggested it was magical and 2) it had cartoon pictures, which appealed to me! Now you will notice none of this is vegan. I wanted to try the non-vegan way first, because I was unsure in terms of actually decorating the cookies without the stiffening element of the meringue powder. Maybe next time I will try it vegan!

Top Picture: Naked sugar cookies

Bottom Picture: Royal icing whipping away!

The hardest part for me was flooding the cookies with royal icing. You have to water down the icing and it’s hard to get the right consistency. I felt like the blue royal icing was not quite watered down enough. The green royal icing for the A cookies came out much better because I had learned from the blue, a clear sign that cookie decorating can only get easier with practice.

Flooded Sugar Cookies

I let the cookies sit over night and then decorated them in the morning with the remaining royal icing and some colored icing I bought at the store. I didn’t do my own decorative colored icing because I could not achieve the colors I wanted with normal food coloring…it was coming out too pastel! I think I will try coloring gels next time. After all this work, I realized I was too sick to go to the party and had most likely contaminated the cookies as well, so I missed the peanut's party and threw 20 painstakingly decorated sugar cookies in the trash!

My favorite decorated cookie! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDREW!

BUT I did learn something about decorating cookies and I am looking forward to improving my decorating skills (and increasing my patience) the next time around!