Messing around with Royal Icing

 

I love love love cookies. There’s something incredibly satisfying about baking them, you know? They’re usually fairly simple to make – and then you end up with such a big batch of lovely treats you can hand out (or keep all to yourself), and a house that smells all lovely and homely. To be fair, I’m usually more of non-fussy kind of cookie girl. The kind you just roll into tiny balls and then flatten a bit and there: nice and robust looking cookies. I do like cut-out cookies from time to time, though. I get really excited about cookie cutters in exciting shapes. It’s just that I usually don’t go through the trouble of icing them once they’re baked.

I’m not the biggest royal icing fan, I must say. I find it a bit overly-sweet and just very sugary. Which is quite the point, I guess, seeing how much sugar goes into it. But when I saw these pumpkin-pie lookalike cookies I got so excited, I knew I had to try them. The idea for the pumpkin pie cookies came from sweetsugarbelle. I got some tips on Royal Icing at the Bake at 350 baking blog, and you can find the cookie recipe I like to use here :)

Things I have learned: wow there goes a lot of icing sugar into royal icing. It’s trickier than I thought – getting all the cookies colored in. (And I needed a lot more icing than I figured.) But in the end I was quite pleased with the results – for a first time trying, I thought they were passable. Even though they are nowhere near as cute as the ones in the pictures that inspired me! (Something to work towards, then, a goal.) I also decided to get out my moomin-cookie cutter and make some moomins. I was still a bit “Ah, Finland!” when baking these, I must admit. Now a next step should probably be trying to give my moomins faces and hands and stuff. But right now that feels like a really daunting task.

 

Tags: baking, cookie cutters, cookies, moomin, pumpkin pie, roll out cookies, royal icing