A New Fifty-Two: Birthday Cookies

This week our twins turned 2!!!

We have 2 that are 2...

I cannot even believe how quickly the time flies!

The Mother's Day Out program that the twins attend allow the parents to bring

a special treat on the children's birthday to celebrate with their classmates.

We decided to make sugar cookies and the twins and Daddy helped.

It was so fun!

I do have to admit that I cheated a bit on the "homemade cookie" front. We had been at the Zoo ALL day and then we went for a nice bike ride. When we started the project we were all exhausted. So, I skipped the homemade sugar cookies and went straight for the bag of Betty Crocker Sugar Cookies in the pantry. (Pretty awesome in a pinch!)

But, the real job came down to the icing. This is what I wanted to focus on this time. I have tried several different ways to make icing and I have never been too excited about the outcome. This time I decided that I wanted to try... drum roll please...

Wilton's Royal Icing recipe...

Which leads me to recipe Number 27 (and I do realize that this year is coming to a close and I am lagging behind on my posts. The good thing is that I have plenty of recipes to post, I just do not seem to have the time. Dear clock fairy - please add some more minutes to my day. Thank you)

Royal Icing

Number 27

By: Wilton

Ingredients

•3 tablespoons Meringue Powder

•4 cups (about 1 lb.) confectioners' sugar

•6 tablespoons warm water

Makes: About 3 cups of icing.

Instructions

Beat all ingredients until icing forms peaks

(7-10 minutes at low speed with a heavy-duty mixer,

10-12 minutes at high speed with a hand-held mixer).

NOTE: Keep all utensils completely grease-free for proper icing consistency.

* For stiffer icing, use 1 tablespoon less water.

**When using large counter top mixer or for stiffer icing, use 1 tablespoon less water.

Thinned Royal Icing: To thin for pouring, add 1 teaspoon water per cup of royal icing. Use grease-free spoon or spatula to stir slowly. Add 1/2 teaspoon water at a time until you reach proper consistency.

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I found the recipe here. Now that I had the recipe, what do I do once it is made?

So I Googled "Decorating with Royal Icing" and I stumbled upon a great blog -

The Brown Eyed Baker

Super cute and great recipes. In fact, great step-by-step instructions on

"How to decorate cookies with Royal Icing"

And so the fun began.

The best advice given, well... I take that back... there was a lot of great advice - that I will share.
One of the best pieces of advice was to prepare, prepare, prepare. Most often I are in a hurry. (Either I am exhausted doing it at the end of a long day with the twins or the twins are sleeping and I only have nap time to finish whatever project it is that I am just starting or the twins need something - hear the reoccurring pattern? The twins?) So, back to the preparation.

We pulled everything out that we needed.

Ingredients. Check. Bowls. Check. Whisks. Check. Food coloring. Check.

Pastry Bags. Check. Tips and couplings. Check. Brain. Where did I put that?

And we went to town. I made the royal icing in Big Red. (That would be my awesome KitchenAid stand up mixer) I followed the Wilton Royal Icing recipe to a "T". I choose to make the icing thick so that I could pipe my design on to the cookie and later "flood" it with the thinner icing. I did consider and follow the notes regarding the "stand up mixer" and "for thicker icing".

I will have to say that it was THICK. So, I added a small amount of water, a drop at a time, and it thinned well.

I was petrified of making this icing. A friend (and sometimes reader of this blog, hello Sissi) makes AWESOME royal icing cookies. She has a great recipe and one time told me that even the humidity in the air that day will affect her icing. Remember, we live in Houston, Texas. SO, I was again petrified that the humidity would ruin my 2 year olds cookies. But, alas, we were okay.

Once we had the icing ready, we separated the icing into three bowls because I choose three colors: Pink, blue and green. I was going for bright vibrant colors. Note to self - I need to work on my color wheel because they were not exactly vibrant.

The truth is, we learned A LOT more than just the fact that I need to work on my color wheel.

Things I learned:

1. Whisks do not work well with thick royal icing. All of the icing just gets stuck in the whisk and we lost a lot of icing and time dealing with it. We switched to a fork and it worked well. The rubber spatulas are perfect for getting the thicker icing into the pastry bags.

2. Disposable pastry bags are difficult to work with. While the clean up is GREAT, I had difficulty with the pastry bag breaking on me. (Am I the only one this happens to?) Next time, I am going to try squeeze bottles especially for the flooding!

On the cookie cutter note...

3. Flour is good! It is helpful to rub your rolling pin often with fresh flour but not too much that it gets all over the cookies!

4. Get some rolling bands. I picked up some measurement rolling pin bands at Sur La Table and they were really helpful!

In general...

5. You can have a lot of fun with your kids and hubby in the kitchen!

Here are some pictures of the process and outcome.

After we colored the thicker icing. I outlined the cookies. I then went back to the pink and blue icing and added a small drop of water at a time and stirred until I reached a consistency that I thought would "flood" the cookies. See, I never could figure out how the icing just wouldn't run all over the place. Brown Eyed Baker, thank you for showing me the light of making an icing dam. I left the third color, the green icing, with the thicker consistency for later decorations.

After we had the thinner consistency, we flooded the icing and used a toothpick to gently push the icing around to fully fill our design.

We then went back with thicker green icing and decorated the cookie.