Sugar, sugar.

So I should probably actually post something in this blog...it's been long enough.

Let's talk cookies. Primarily, I'm on a cupcake high, but this week I've been working on sugar cookies for the first time in months and I was excited to blog about it.

Up until this past December, I had officially given up on sugar cookies. While they're extremely common and claim to be the most basic kind of cookie, I instead found them infuriating. I tried recipe after recipe and always came out with un-bakeable goop. The gooey stuff tasted pretty good but refused to turn into dough that I could cut and bake. Actually, I managed to get shapes out of ONE recipe, but they grew enormous once they were in the oven. And by enormous, I mean baked into one another and over the pan to form one huge cookie. It was awful.

Anyways, I finally found one I looove and I also discovered that when a recipe says "chill overnight", it literally means chill overnight. No jokes.

So now I have a lovely recipe which not only works for looks, but tastes quite fantastic! Add that to my awesome piping and flooding skills and you have one very, very happy girl. (Okay, so the "skills" is a little braggy, I still need more practice, but it's quite fun).

A very, very happy girl makes sweet cookies that look something this:



These are obviously from the holidays and were actually my very first sugar cookies that I piped & flooded with royal icing. These cute little stockings followed:



From there, I basically went sugar cookie happy. We all saw it coming. Since the holidays were over almost right after I learned how to do this, I had to channel my energy somewhere. Luckily, Boyfriend was around, so I made him these:



I probably ate at least half of them before he got to my house. You can justify eating anything if it spells out your name. Everyone knows that. For example, this cookie was a result of me playing around while I made cookies with Boyfriend (he's quite handy in the kitchen, he has mad focusing skills). Anyways, upon seeing the icing "j", my dog (whose name also happens to start with a J) got the notion this was HIS cookie. Anyways, long story short, right after this picture I dropped the cookie and my dog inhaled it. He's not supposed to eat human food, but again, the name/initial rule came in to play here. Big time.

Last but not least, I have one more sugar cookie picture (for now, I just got new cookie cutters I'm dying to use). This is a picture of me trying my hand at what I called "bridal shower cookies". Because who doesn't love sweet cookies? I mean sweet as in sentimental, not in taste. But luckily, these were both. The cakes actually look a little boring, so next time I'm going to try adding more detail to them. Also, I had a major cookie fiasco with the first batch so by the time I got to the flooding, my icing had started to harden, which is why the icing looks a little bumpy. I didn't realize this until they had dried.

Again, the lumpy icing isn't working for me, but at least I know how to fix that for the next round.



Thanks for reading, I'll be posting new pictures soon! I hope to work on some cupcakes this week, so I'll have a post about the outcomes of that as well.


Happy, happy Wednesday.
--Amanda.