Decorated Springtime cookies
Bubby's afterschool club is having a bake sale tomorrow. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make some decorated cookies! I thought of an Easter theme, but often schools object to holidays that not everyone celebrates. Plus, we just had the first day of Spring. The perfect occasion to use my butterfly cookie cutter!
I'd made the dough yesterday morning, always using Martha Stewart's sugar cookie recipe, and baked the cookies in the evening. So I thought the project would only take me a couple of hours today. But nothing ever goes according to plan!
It took me over an hour to lay out the supplies, make the royal icing, tint it. I like to use this recipe from Sally's Baking Blog. But today I ran into trouble with the consistency. Although in the bowl it looked like 10-second icing, as I piped it, it was still too thick and the piping tips kept getting clogged. It must have been exceptionally dry in the house, without my noticing. The recipe does say that on very dry days one shoudl use up to 14 tbsp of water, where I only used 9 to begin with then added teaspoons or drops to my different batches. Still, the icing was flowing as expected, so I have no explanation for these clots. Dealing with this took time, as I had to take the icing out of the bags and water it down, and then during the piping I kept having to take off the tips and wash them. Goodness!
I'd planned to use violet and orange for the wings and green for the body of the butterfly. Then I saw some colorful blue, orange and green spatulas on the counter and they looked so good together that I changed the plan and instead of violet I used Americolor Royal Blue. But this looked like a Wedgwood blue on the icing, so I added a few drops of Americolor Navy. This achieved a sort of Indigo color, and it was getting duskier than liked, so I left it alone. For the green batch, I combined Americolor Lemon Yellow and Americolor Leaf Green to get a lime green color. I quite like this shade of green I got.
My plan for decorating the cookies was to pipe a blue outline, forming a top and a bottom section for each wing; fill the wing with orange, then drag the blue into the orange to get blue streaks. But that didn't look good, possibly because the blue outline was not thick enough and too firm. So I abandoned that idea in favor of a simpler outline of the entire wing. I dispersed blue dots throughout the orange wing, but that didn't look right. Then I did some cookies where I dragged a toothpick through the dots on the wing to make small heart shapes. I tried making lots of hearts, somewhat connected, but didn't like that and ended up making less hearts per wing. It turned out OK but not great. I wish I had either done violet with orange or, and I think this would have been the best look, blue outline with yellow wing. The most successful part of the butterfly was the body. For this I piped fat green dots, almost blobs, using a Wilton #4 tip, and then connected them slightly with a toothpick. This allowed me to form a very cool, bumpy butterfly body.
When I came to the last butterfly I'd almost run out of orange icing and couldn't stick to the pattern. I ended up not bothering to change the #4 tip to the usual #2, and just piping an entire green wing, with orange hearts on it and an orange butterfly body. Wouldn't you know, this was the winning design! This was the best-looking cookie of the entire batch. But of course, I couldn't then go back and redo the whole thing. So, note taken for the next time!
Now let's hope they dry in time to pack them up tomorrow morning and send them off to school. I wonder if anyone will think of all these design snafus when they look at the cookies. I hope not!
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