Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

  Speckled Bunnies Sugar Cookies I can't let Easter go by without making and decorating sugar cookies!  I use a basic recipe from Martha Stewart that I've had for a long time. Here it is: 3 cups flour 3/4 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 2 sticks butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 2 tsp vanilla extract Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Beat butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. Add flour mixture, beat until combined. To make chocolate sugar cookies, replaced 1/3 cup flour with 1/3 cup cocoa powder.  I've been making these sugar cookies for many years and for all occasions. I've never tried any other sugar cookie recipe!  Years ago I used to spend an entire day decorating cookies, using different cutters, making many bags of royal icing in separate outline and flood consistencies, and in different colors. Then I learned to use just one consistency for both outlining and flooding and got away from intricate decorations.  I want to keep u...

  "Butterfly" sugar 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 th...

It's Bubby's last year of school and I am missing no opportunities to send in treats to make him proud and help him enjoy his day. I made these simple sugar cookies with pale pink royal icing and he took them in on two days before Valentine's Day. I figured on the day of there would be all kinds of treats, and we knew the day before there would be a snow day. At the last minute the snowstorm went off in another direction, and Bubby reports that on Valentine's day there were no treats to be found anywhere. It figures! However I heard everyone did enjoy these cookies to start off the week.     Valentine's Day sugar cookies  

I made these Sugar Pumpkin Cookies for a bake sale for an after-school club of Bubby's. I relied on my old Martha Stewart recipe for the cookies and  my favorite royal icing recipe . I used 10 tablespoons of water which worked out great on this particular day (it does depend on the level of humidity on any given day). Lately I'd been adding 9 tablespoons then had to add extra water afterwards. I don't have any orange food coloring, so I made an orange color using red and yellow. It was a bit peachy but once piped it was OK. I used brown for the stems.  With such flowy icing, I piped the two outer sections of the pumpkin on a few cookies at a time, let them set for a few minutes, then went back and piped the middle section and the stem.  In this way the icing didn't flow together (as happened with the first few cookies I piped) and I was able to show the three distinct sections I wanted.  In spite of the low humidity on this day these took almost 24 hours to dry, so ...

This year I made several dozen  Decorated Sugar Cookies,  some for us to enjoy and some to send to my family and friends in the Caribbean. When I send them baked goods I always try to mail the package on a Monday, in hopes they will arrive by the following Saturday at latest, and avoid an overnight in a post office somewhere. I made one batch of  Chocolate Sugar Cookies  and one batch Vanilla . I used an egg shaped cutter, a large bunny head cutter, and a bunny cutter.  I always use  this royal icing recipe  from Sallys Bake Blog and although I'm not the biggest fan of royal icing, I think it does have a pretty good taste and never fails to dry no matter how much water I end up adding.  I do recommend this recipe.  I made five colors: a blue, a pink, a green, a yellow, and a purple.  Pretty basic! I flooded the bunnies in pink and the eggs in blue.  My original idea was to do a floral design, inspired by  this tutorial ...