Woo! Second post. Within some kind of semi-reasonable timeframe!
Sorta.
Maybe.
Not.
Anyways, this shall be a series of posts, and it's going to be quite a long one, as I have recently baked/decorated three different types of biscuit over the past few weeks.
First off, we shall start with this semi-disaster of cookie decorating:
No heckling, please.
Now, these may not look that bad, and they still tasted okay, but the more astute among you may have noticed a couple of small issues,
1. My ability to pipe in circles (or in general) is kinda sucky.
2. The colouring isn't particularly vibrant.
3. They are shiny, and so not dry (okay, you may not have noticed that one, but it was an issue)
If I were a magpie, the shiny would be perfectly acceptable
I'm going to address these issues in turn, in the hopes that maybe it will help someone to avoid repeating my mistakes, or offer me some words of wisdom that will help me not repeat them.
1. I think my inability to pipe is more due to a lack of experience/technique than an actual problem with my icing, I have been watching countless youtube videos of how to correct this, and so hopefully my next attempt will be a tad more aesthetically pleasing.
Again, they still tasted okay. And really, that's the important thing, right? Right? No? Okay
2. I was aiming for black icing, and vivid red icing. I kinda wound up with grey and tomato soup coloured icing. There are a few reasons for this, first of which being my red was made with liquid food colouring, which really isn't great for vibrant colours. The other was that my 'black' was done with black colouring paste, and I didn't realise exactly how much I'd need for it to work.
Next time, it appears that adding cocoa powder to my icing may help get it black, but that needs to be tested.
Not shown here: the bucket of colouring used to get this far.
3. My icing took around 3 days to set. This is not normal, even for flood icing. And it wasn't that humid. One explanation I can come up with was that too much of my watering down for flood icing was done with food colouring liquid. Number two may be that it was simply too watered down. Number three is that the universe kinda hates me.
Number four is due to some other incompetence that I'm sure someone will call me up on.
Bottom line is: this wasn't a perfect attempt, but it was an attempt.
Sugar cookie recipe
(This came with my set of portal cookie cutters)
185g of butter, softened
1 cup caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 1/2 cups plain flour
- Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
- Add egg and vanilla essence, mix until well combined
- Add flour, around half a cup at a time, switch to dough beaters or by hand when mixture becomes too thick for normal beaters
- Wrap dough in cling wrap and chill for about 2-3 hours (or stick it in the freezer for 20-30 mins, if you're impatient like me)
- Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes (This dough is very soft, but not overly sticky, so if you're going to roll it between two sheets of baking paper, be careful not to roll it too thin)
- Bake at 160 degrees for about 10-15 minutes, or until bottoms are just lightly brown (cooking time depends on the size of your cookies)
- Leave to cool completely before icing
After baking your cookies, outline in royal icing (whatever recipe works for you), then water down your icing so that when you pick it up with a spoon and drop it back into the mixture, it smooths out within around 10 seconds. Flood cookies with icing, and use a toothpick to push icing into any gaps.
There are plenty of youtube/blogging tutorials on how to do this, so I won't detail it too greatly.
For the heart shaped swirls, simply pipe dots of a different coloured icing onto your flooded cookies before they dry, then swirl through the centre of the dots with a toothpick. It's easy, and looks pretty effective.
I hope this was helpful, or at the very least, somewhat amusing.
More cookie capers to follow!
Procrasti-baker out.
No comments:
Post a Comment