Sugar Cookies

It really is fun to make decorated sugar cookies---it does take some time and a steady hand, but they look so cute and taste so good that it's really worth the effort.  The cookies above were made for a bridal shower and so each kitty cookie had a little silver crown with a purple bow and flower on it to mix with the bridal shower's colors of purple and black.  Here's a brief explanation of how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing.

Recipe:

You can use any of your favorite rolled sugar cookie recipes but the one that I prefer to work with is called the NFSC recipe (NFSC stands for Never Fail Sugar Cookies) and I found the recipe on a cake decorating website called Cake Central.  If you google the recipe you'll find it all over the internet, but here's one link to it:  https://cakecentral.com/recipe/no-fail-sugar-cookies

After you've baked your cookies and they come out of the oven, they'll look a bit plain like this:

Plain little kitty cookie.

But don't fear!  It's time to make some royal icing to make your cookies look FABULOUS!!  I prefer to use this recipe:  http://cakecentral.com/recipe/antonia74-royal-icing  It really does work well!

The first step is to outline your cookies with royal icing.  I use the icing just as it is-add whatever gel color to the icing that you prefer (black in this instance), and pipe onto cookies using a number 3 tip.  I find that the above recipe is just the perfect consistency for this step.

All outlined!

It's easier to just outline all of the cookies at once and let the outline set up a little bit before filling in the cookies with white icing.

To fill in the kitty face, you need to thin down some of the white royal icing with a little bit of water--I add water, just a small amount at a time, until I achieve a consistency that allows the icing to fill the cookie easily, not too thin, but not thick either--Then color some of the icing whatever color you'd like the bow to be and fill in that area as well.

You can see that I filled in all of the bows first and then went back and filled in the white faces of the kitties last.  If you plan to stack the cookies or put them in plastic bags it's best to let the cookies set for at least 24-48 hours to make sure the icing is thoroughly dry.  You don't want to mess up your pretty cookie art!!  Enjoy!!!