To be honest, cookie making is not my forte. I made some in the past, and were never satisfied. Tried my hand at decorating cookies a few years back, but didn’t have the patience (nor read proper instructions/tips to make royal icing properly) and really haven’t tried it again since.
Queue 2016 Christmas. As I’m on maternity leave, it has completely kicked start my drive for baking (in between baby napping and such). After weeks of reading online recipes, tips and tricks from cookie experts and royal icing decorating ideas, I was pumped!
Made a basic sugar cookie recipe I found (googled “Easy Sugar Cookies”) and found this one. It tasted terrific! and super easy to make. I didn’t follow the icing recipe on the site as I didn’t want to put fresh milk in a recipe..didn’t seem…good to keep not refrigerated after? So back to google and found a recipe that uses Meringue Powder – don’t recall the source..but here is the recipe:
- 5 T. meringue powder
- 3/4 C. very warm water
- 1 t. cream of tartar
- 2 1/4 pounds powdered sugar (I weigh it—2 lb. 4 oz. or 36 oz.)
- 2 tsp. almond (or vanilla) extract (oil free/alcohol free)
I added a bit of lemon juice (for flavouring) and gel food colouring.
I chose a few shapes (mittens, snowflake, circles) and got to mixing the colours and decorating!
Ta da! Packaged these up as gifts.
With some of the leftover sugar cookie sheet, I decided to do another shape since Ellie’s bday is coming up! Aren’t these cute?!
Here is the model (in case you are new here)…the cookies doesn’t do her justice…will need to practice that one a bit more!
My Samoyed Model
And finally…I made a new batch in time for Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Rooster..so made some chicks and roosters with simple round sugar cookies!
that’s it…after years without making sugar cookies, I went crazy making these. And very satisfied, and definitely will make more in the future!
By the way…I made majority of these 2 to 3 weeks ahead of gifting them. I just put them in individual sandwich bags, and then frozen it together in an airtight container. The day I needed them, I took it out of the freezer, and kept it in the container until it was at room temperature. It worked well, colours are still as bright, and the cookie did not go stale!