Saturday, November 30, 2013

Month 2 of 12- A Breakthrough

Don't get too excited....my cookies don't look good....yet.  But I did finally find a sugar cookie recipe and icing recipe that I really like.  I am still going to experiment with other recipes but this is going to be my go-to recipe. 

The sugar cookie recipe is from thedecoratedcookie.com.  I changed one thing about this recipe.  A friend who also decorates cookies told me that the secret is to use cake flour.  I found that using all cake flour will make the dough too difficult to work with.  I used half regular flour and half cake flour.  I also used half almond flavoring and half vanilla flavoring (I love the taste of almond).  The result was DELICIOUS cookies that held their shape and the dough was easy to work with.  I was so happy to finally find a recipe I loved!  

The royal icing recipe I used was from sweetsugarbelle.com.  The recipe was easy to make and easy to work with.  I again used half vanilla flavoring and half almond flavoring....yum!  

I made the dough on day 1, baked the cookies on day 2 and decorated on day 3.  

My breakthrough with the sugar cookie recipe and success with the icing made me feel better about not being successful with my decorating skill.  One thing at a time.  Hopefully next month will be my breakthrough on decorating.  

I piped my leaves with a brown icing, then flooded with yellow or green flood icing.  I really like the wet-on-wet technique and did this with the alternate color to make the veins on the leaves.  I didn't really like the way they turned out.  Then I used the color spray mist to add the changing leaf colors to the finish.  I didn't really like the way those came out either. 

My favorite cookies were the leaves with no wet-on-wet and no color mist spray and I piped the brown vein of the leaf on top when the flood icing dried.      

Here is the final result:


They tasted soooo good!