A few years ago I stumbled upon some bloggers* that made the most amazing decorated sugar cookies. At the time I was still in college and even though I read their tutorials I couldn't help but think that making these types of cookies was out of my league. Additionally, I recently started following the Doughmestic Housewife on Instagram and her work is amazing and inspiring. Seeing her cookies pop up on my Instagram feed made me reconsider attempting to decorate cookies with royal icing. So I started reading the cookie blogs* again and doing my research.
I had thought about making onesie sugar cookies for the baby shower that I helped throw last month, but ran out of time to make them. So I decided to make some for Isley when she was born and since she was born at the beginning of May it was convenient to make Mother's Day cookies at the same time.
This was the set I made for Mother's Day. I sent one set to my Mom as well as Gavin's Mom.
I forgot to get a good picture of the set I made for Isley before taking it over to Joel and Darcy's house, but you get the gist from this picture.
One of my favorite cookies was the chevron heart. I pretty much followed Sugarbelle's tutorial. The one thing I did differently was instead of transferring the chevron pattern to a transparency I just cut a whole section/line of the chevron pattern out. That way I didn't have to eyeball how far apart to put the lines. That way I could just line the bottom of the paper up with a line I had already drawn to keep my spacing between the lines consistent. I didn't take a picture, but hopefully the description was clear enough. I also put a little "y" so I could remember what color to put in each section.
Then I outlined the cookie and chevron lines and then filled the yellow sections. The icing I used was around 15-12 second icing.
Once the yellow icing had dried for a while I went back and filled in the remaining sections with grey icing of the same consistency.
It is ok if the icing doesn't get into all the corners because you can use a toothpick to push the icing into the gaps.
This is a better picture of some of the cookies for Isley that I took in daylight. Ideally I would have taken the time to add some leaves to the roses, but I was short on time. Also on the larger heart the rose totally is covering up a place where I got impatient and tested the icing to see if it was dry. Guess what: it wasn't. That is ok though :) Decorations like roses and ruffles are good for hiding mistakes ;)
One detail that I really liked on the Mother's Day cookies was the gold piping on the Mom cookie. It is pretty much impossible to make gold icing so you have to go back and paint on the gold to dried icing. I used yellow icing as the base for the gold, but you could also use white or brown. You can use luster dust with a little bit of alcohol or use color sprays. I personally went with the color spray option. You can just spray a little bit of the color spray onto wax paper this liquid is similar to what the luster dust and alcohol would be. Then you can use the gold liquid to paint anywhere you want your cookies to be gold.
I love the look of the gold and am excited to use it on future cookies! Below are some up close pictures of the Mother's Day set of cookies I made.
The hand cut letters were really pretty, but had a tendency to break. The C cookie I made for my Mom broke right as I was starting to decorate it and the L cookie for Gavin's Mom broke as I was packaging it. However, Isley's I cookie made it safe and sound and in one piece. I still think I would do hand cut letters again, but only if I didn't need to ship them.
This was my first attempt at brush embroidery and it turned out ok, but I think I need some practice.
Overall I was really happy with my first attempt at royal icing decorated sugar cookies! I can't wait to have another go soon!
*If you are just starting out on the adventure of cookie decorating or at all curious I would recommend checking out Bake at 350, Sweetopia, Karen's Cookie Blog and my favorite Sweet Sugar Belle. They all have really good tutorials and recipes for sugar cookie decorating.
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