Royal Icing Revisited

After making the gingerbread cookies for the homebirth picnic, I was reminded what a nice offering cut out cookies are.  When I was looking around for a house cookie cutter, I had found a very cute fish cutter and thought it would be nice for my little fish, Kessa.  This summer she has become quite the swimmer.

As swim lessons were finishing up, I thought fish cookies might be a nice gift for the swim instructor.  And because the gingerbread recipe makes so many cookies, why not treat the whole life guarding staff to cookies.  They have been very supportive and kind to us this summer.

I had just enough time to bake the cookies, but I kept wishing I would have time to frost them too.  I wanted to work with royal icing again.

Our swim instructor was heading back to college and we would finish up our two remaining lessons with another instructor.  Somehow she had missed out on last week's cookie offering!  We were attending a party for friends and my mom's birthday was coming, that gave me three great reasons to make more cookies!

I started in the morning thinking I would just make some fish cookies again for the swim teacher and then chill the rest of the dough until I could make more.  But somehow everything went very smoothly and quickly and I made all the cookies at once.  Having a late sleeping toddler has everything to do with it I'm sure.

Still having royal icing on the mind, and a free afternoon, I wondered if we could make it happen.  I was nervous about using my hand mixer again.  My only experience with royal icing was with my mom and the unicycle cookies.  I read the royal icing recipe again:  4 cups of powdered sugar, 2 TB of meringue powder and 5 TB of water, and then add more water for piping.  I wondered if I just added an extra tablespoon of water from the beginning if my mixer would be happier and it might just work out for piping.  It did!  The icing mixed up beautifully and then I quickly moved to coloring small batches.  I was concerned about it drying out and when my two year old couldn't locate the plastic wrap, I enlisted the help of my eight year old, Sydney and later my twelve year old, Kyle as well.

We laid out the cookies and started decorating.  Sydney was very happy to be decorating along with me.  The icing was perhaps a touch soft for decorating, but it seemed to work well and was very easy to handle.  Our biggest challenge was Kessa being her wiggly self, but that's when Kyle came to the rescue and read stories to her.

As royal icing dries quickly, that is exactly what it did!  I almost wished we had even more time to do some flooding first, but I think with the gingerbread background, the colorful embellishments we made showed up just fine.

After making three batches of cookies within a month, I wondered why I don't make cookies other times of the year.  I grew up with my mom making cookies for every occasion and even just because.  I think the biggest reason is that at our schools, homemade goodies are no longer accepted and with that many opportunities to make cookies have been lost.  I will just need to keep the cookies in mind for other parties and gifts.  It's an enjoyable activity and becoming even easier as the kids get older.

Unicycle Cookies

My husband is a mountain unicyclist. My 7 year old daughter rides a unicycle too. I had looked for unicycle related items in the past and knew there was a limited supply. Last Christmas I found someone who could custom make a unicycle ornament for us. Custom seems to be the key with unicycles.

A unicycle only race was coming up and I thought it would be fun to bring decorated unicycle cookies. I did a Google search for unicycle cookie cutter. No luck.

Then I did a search for custom cookie cutters and I found this little kit. How hard could it be to make a cookie cutter?

It turned out to be pretty easy. I started out on the big side and then scaled the design down.

Then off to the baking and decorating. I decided to make my mom's recipe for gingerbread cookies. They come out great and are very tasty. The recipe comes from Applehood and Motherpie. I also spent a few nap times learning about frosting cookies with royal frosting. I was intrigued. A blog I found called Annie's Eats had many great tips. I even used the recommended recipe for both the frosting and a batch of sugar cookies.

Having three children and one of them under 2, I had to give myself a few days for decorating. My mom was able to come over and give me a hand and we made a great team.

The first challenge was just making the royal frosting. Everywhere I looked the recommendation was to use a standing mixer. Some people even reported having burned out their hand mixers trying to make royal frosting. I looked into buying one, but they are very expensive and I needed it the very next day!

My mom and I decided we would try to use our hand mixers, but we would use two and switch them in and out when the motors felt warm. It worked!

I had bought some new supplies too: squeeze bottles, decorator bags, tips, and gel food coloring.

With my 18 month old on my back, we started with the royal icing on the gingerbread cookies. It took a long time, but we created unicycle cookies!

I still had the sugar cookies to decorate, but I was running out of time. I made up some buttercream frosting and tried a simplified outlining and very quickly they were done too!

I was excited to complete this project and share the unicycle cookies. Of course the other unicyclists seemed to get a kick out of them too.