Baking sugar cookies | And decorate them in Christmas style!
A few failed attempts to decorate cookies
In the past few weeks, I've done a few attempts to bake cookies with the intention to decorate them later. Unfortunately, all attempts failed because of the cookies rising rather than staying in their actual form. By accident (looking for another recipe) I read that this can be solved by using a simplified recipe for these cookies. This way you can ensure that the cookies are still flat enough to decorate with icing or fondant.
Ingredients and directions
Below you can find the instructions to bake these simple, but good, cookies. Just a few ingredients are needed and there's not much that can go wrong if you stick to the steps.
After they were cooled off, I decided to decorate some of the Christmas tree cookies using cookie icing. You just fill a cup with a bit of water and a drop (or few drops) of food colouring before you add powdered sugar. No need to measure it, you can see if it's too thick or thin and add a bit of water or powdered sugar to change the thickness.
Before you start adding the color on top of the cookies, first make an upstanding edge to make sure it won't drop to the sides (it happened to a few cookies here even with the edge as I was adding too much frosting). I bought Dr.Oetker decor pens for the edges. Just warm these up in a glass of water for a minute or 2 and then you can push out the sugar easily.
Add some decoration to make it look like a decorated Christmas tree, and now let them dry overnight before eating them.
I honestly thought the flatter ones would be the tasty ones, but it turned out that the thicker cookies stayed a bit soft on the inside and tasted more like butter cookies (yum) and the flatter ones were indeed perfect to decorate but less tasty. Next time I will stick to the flat ones for decoration and we eat the thicker (failed ones) as is.
Enjoy!
https://twitter.com/makehivethrive/status/1333005498954690566
Uuh, they look great!
Today was also a baking day for me, I made a nice banana cake with apples and quinces (we have an abundance of quinces at the moment, so I use them whenever I can ^^).
I also want to bake some cookies during the Advent season :-) I'm excited to try, because it's still an adventure to bake with the wood burning stove. Cake works well by now, but cookies are a different level ^^
Thank you!
Oh that sounds delicious banana cake, I never made one (still on the to do list) .. I have to look up quinces (lol) don't know what that is..
I think every oven / stove is so different it's really alrady a huge difference with our previous oven and this one after we moved here.. I never trust the exact baking time honestly, can be so different.
I can imagine that cookies will be done quicker than 10 minutes in a stove? or is that a misconception that that's probably baking a lot faster?
Please share your cookies with us when you bake them :) haha
These are so beautiful!
I love decorating cookies.
Thank you, could have been a lot cuter, but have to admit that I was kind of clumsy with the pens to make the edges.. :) When you decorate cookies, how do you keep them while waiting for the icing to get hard? Last attempt I put them in a box, the next day they were all sticking together lol.. this time I left them on a baking tray, but I wonder how to do so when you have a lot of them..
I don't know of another way other than leave them all out till they are dried. I have two recipes with different icings that need to dry before boxing. I have stacking wire cooling racks and LOTS of trays. I normally put them on the trays and leave them out all night. When I do box them, I put layers of waxed paper between the layers..... just in case. 😃
so it would not be bad to just leave them in the kitchen ? I thought maybe they'd dry out so I put them in the oven (which was cool by the time I went to bed obviously lol) but at least then there was a closed door.. wasn't too sure what the smartest thing to do was.. good point putting a paper between te layers! thanks for the tips :)
The cookie on the recipes I needed to leave out survived the "over night" just fine. I was very hesitant to leave them out when I first came across the issue, but boxing them was out of the question, even with waxed paper, they would have stuck to the paper as well. I was forced to try to leave the out all night. Fortunately for me, both icings dried and the cookies were none the worse for it. One was a semi-soft molasses cookie and the other was a pecan sandie cookie that is not supposed to be crispy through and through.
I do suppose there would be some cookie recipes that would get dry or too soft depending.... but sometimes you just have to try it to see.
In the cold oven sounds like a good idea too, especially if it is a humid day / night.
Thanks for sharing :)
Tomorrow I will try to build a Gingerbread house.. first time ever haha.. wish me luck!
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STOPThe cookies look so delicious and festive.
Thank you, I have to admit, they had a lot of sugar in and on it lol..
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Thanks for the support! :)