Sunday, October 10, 2010

Cookies for Fall





Made these last week for a friend's girl scout meeting. I used the No Fail Sugar Cookie recipe (NFSC) from Cake Central and Sweetopia's Royal Icing recipe. I preferred the NFSC recipe over Sweetopia's this time around...the recipe calls for less butter and more flour so it was easier to work with but taste wise seemed quite similar. Both cookie recipes don't spread a lot so they retain the cutter shapes well.
The icing/decorations were all trial and error to see what looked best. My favorites were the acorns made with the chocolate jimmies and painted with edible copper luster, the red oak leaves made using marbled red food color during dipping and the sycamore that just won me over by the detailed shape of the cookie. Also liked the pumpkin which I've made before but this time dressed it up with orange sprinkles. The green stems and tendrils are made from green candy melts. 

If you are interested in making iced sugar cookies, you must must read Sweetopia's detailed tutorials on making the icing, coloring, and piping. And her cookies are amazingly detailed and impossibly cute! 
Icing recipe and directions:
Cookie recipe:
Notes:
- Wilton candy melts are available in various colors at Michaels ACMoore and other craft stores. I keep a few colors handy.
- The royal icing recipe calls for Meringue powder which is available in better groceries and craft stores and tends to be relatively expensive. But usually you can get atleast 3 batches of icing from one container. I buy Chefmaster brand meringue online wherever I can get a good deal but have used Wilton brand also.
- The cookie recipe makes atleast 70-80 cookies. So I used half the recipe and froze the rest of the dough.
- The icing recipe makes enough to ice 40-50 cookies comfortably.














2 comments:

  1. The squirrels are my favorite.
    How did the frozen dough turn out?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The frozen dough works just as good as freshly made dough. Just need to thaw it in the refrigerator for a day or on the counter for a few hours. I have also rolled dough into a log and froze it and then just sliced and baked it the next time. Of course the cookies get less tender everytime you roll and re-roll scraps so they're not as good as the 1st batch but I can't always tell.

    ReplyDelete