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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Cookies!

Happy Sunday!  The weather while I was typing last week’s post was certainly much nicer than today’s!  I’m enjoying a cup of hot tea just to keep my fingers warm enough to type!  Well, not quite, but it’s still way too cold for May.

While not a cake, today’s featured design was just as fun to decorate.  I made several dozen decorated sugar cookies for a little girl’s birthday party.  She enjoys horseback riding, so they requested sugar cookies to look like little horses.



Usually for decorated cookies like this I use a technique called flooding.  To “flood” cookies, I use royal icing to pipe a border around the edge of the cookie which acts like a dam. 

Thinner royal icing is then poured onto the surface of the cookie.  Since the icing is thin, it forms a perfectly smooth surface.  And since royal icing dries very firmly, the designs hold their shape and won’t get messed up in transportation.


For these cookies, though, I slightly more of a challenge.  The birthday girl really liked chocolate, so they wanted to know if I could make chocolate royal icing instead.  I had never flavored royal icing before and I was initially skeptical of adding chocolate or cocoa powder because I knew that royal icing dries the way it does because there isn’t any fat in it.  Add in some kind of fat – butter, shortening – or in this case, chocolate – and I was afraid that the icing wouldn’t set up properly.  But after some research I found that a small amount of cocoa powder could be added to the icing without adversely affecting it! 


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