7 posts tagged “cookies”

I stumbled upon a lovely wedding favor site: Bella Regalo

Gorgeous stuff.

Some of my favorites:

I love the different styles for dresses - now I'm all inspired to crack open a wedding magazine and cookify the gowns!

Cookie cakes that are too cute:

It's amazing what you can dig up using google image. Just some random images I found that I really like :)

Today I went to Sur la Table for the first time, and I loved it! Though, with a title like Sur la Table, I thought it would be a notch above Williams-Sonoma, but I found it to be more casual and less uppity. Not that I dislike Williams-Sonoma, but they are very high end - everything is extremely organized and uncommon. For example, Sur la Table carried products by Wilton, a mass market brand that Wal-Mart and Michaels also carries, but Williams-Sonoma never has. I was also surprised by how messy the store was. A ton of the displays were sloppy and seemed to be just piled up (unlike Sonoma which is always neatly stacked). And the clearance section, oh my! A pigsty. I don't mind at all, but it's just my observations of the store. (and I guess surprise too, because it was in such a high end area. but i think mainly the name threw me off - Sur la Table! Doesn't that sound expensive?). I bought a pack of 7 butterfly cookie cutters, it won't be until the summer when I use them, but at least they don't go bad! I found some dolphin/shark/turtle/fish sprinkles and fell in love. But I'm going to wait until May to buy them because I want them to be as fresh as possible (even though I know i'll more than likely be buying the same ones I saw today. Too cute. I already have a billion ideas of what I will do with them.) And speaking of ideas, I visited their website today and fell in love with their cookie examples for the cookie cutters they sell. Gorgeous. I'll let them speak for themselves.

Also, I ended up purchasing these from Amazon, can't wait to get them in:

Over the past few days I have been learning about decorating cookies using royal icing. Unfortunately, I needed cookies to practice on since its no fun icing cardboard or anything else.
There's a lot of technical comments in this post, but I had to include it so I have something to refer to in the future when I forget everything.
So began my adventures in baking and decorating...

      I love this book! It had been in my "too buy" list on Amazon, but then I saw it one day at half-price books. Score! Although, it wasn't that much cheaper compared to Amazon, but I did get instant gratification. I love flipping through this book and gawking at all the cakes. What inspired me most were the stacked cookies - too adorable for me. Small, dainty, same ooh-aah reaction with less work, I was infatuated with this cake wannabes. After I saw them in this book I was determined to try and make my own - which started my whole x-mas break cookie craze.

As for the sugar cookie recipe...
Flour - 4 1/3 cup + 2 tbs
Salt - 1 tsp
Baking Powder - 1 tsp
Unsalted Butter - 1.5 sticks
Granulated Sugar - 1/2 cup + 2 tbs
Large Egg - 1
Pure Vanilla Extract - 1 tsp
      Instant Failure. Too too try. I couldn't get a dought out of this! After I did some googling, I realized that the recipe was printed incorrectly and there was a correction on the publisher's site for 2 1/3 cups + 2 tbs instead of the printed 4. Too late for me - I was stuck with a bad batch. Utterly discouraged, I tossed it and said I was done with making my own cookies until I had learned how to use royal icing - after all, my main goal was to learn to ice, not to bake.

      After my experience with the Confetti Cakes recipe, I decided to buy ready made cookie dough so I could cut, bake, and decorate! However, I realized that this dough puffs up and spreads. So everything I made was never exact. I tried to cut the cookie immediately after it came out of the oven, but it still left some ugly edges. First attempt at icing them. Icing was way too runny, but at least they looked cute from a distance!

      After baking the ready made cookie dough and having them come out odd shaped and texturized (cracks = bad as icing falls through), I decided to just skip straight to icing and bought finished cookies instead. Again, my icing was waaaaay too watery, but they are getting better!  And a side note, Kroger's 99 cent sugar cookie packs are NASTY. not the fresh baked, but the ones in the actual cookie aisle.

     I decided that maybe I should try rolling the dough, chilling, then cutting in hopes of getting crisp edges since the first time I did everything at room temperature. Nope, didn't work, but at least I got to practicing icing. Still too watery. But you can see I am gradually improving.

      Since there is no way I can get a perfect cookie out of the pre made dough, I decided to try my hand at icing again on finished sugar cookies from Target. I've been using the Royal Icing recipe from Cookie Craft, but the recipes are way too watery for me. They ask per 1 pound of powdered sugar to add  1/3 cup egg whites, 2tbs of water, and 2tsp vanilla extract - I just couldn't get it to not run, so I modified another recipe that didn't use water for me, and perfecto! Finally got a stiff icing.
     I also switched up my method of making icing. Before, I made a batch of stiff icing, split it into 4 and colored. Then I would made another batch of runny icing, split it into 4 and colored. Aside from having to use the mixer twice (more work), there was also an issue of not getting the colors of the  stiff and flooded icings to match exactly.
      Therefore, I decided to make 1 big batch, split it into the colors, then only put 1/2 of each color into a pastry bag - and then just added water to the other 1/2 to make it runny. Less work, exact colors, yay!

     However, I did accidently add too much water to the white and you can tell from the photos that it is way too thin.
     Overall, I consider this a success!

Attempt #6a. Beautiful Cakes by Peggy Porschen, p.118
      After being kind of discouraged by my previous efforts, I saw this book at Barnes & Noble and was inspired again. Beautiful cookies, cupcakes, mini cakes - tons of inspiration! I loved how in one recipe, she decorated the cupcake holder, not just the cupcake itself. Visually gorgeous.
-Cookies were okay, seemed to have little taste. However, kept their shape beautifully.

Sugar cookie notes...
Unsalted Butter - 1.75 sticks
Sugar - 1 cup
Large Egg - 1
All-Purpose Flour - 3 cups
Vanilla Extract - 2 tsp

Attempt #6b. Cookie Craft by Valerie Peterson & Janice Fryer
     I also love this book! It is a visual delight to flip through. I first saw it at BookPeople, and bought it a few days later from Amazon. It is full of ideas to inspire you, and tons of random cookie tips as well. I love how they use simple shapes and simple lines to create really striking designs (that's too many s's right there..) And the illustrations are too cute.

Salt - 1/2 tsp
Unsalted Butter - 2 cups
Sugar - 1 cup
Large Egg - 1
All-purpose flour - 3 cups
Vanilla Extract - 2 tsp

-The only difference between this recipe and the one above was the extra 1/4 stick of butter + 1/2 teaspoon of salt... and what a difference! These cookies had a richer and more delicious taste. But to be nit picky, they had more shrinkage than the Beautiful Cakes (#7) recipe. Not enough to make me care though, just something a noticed. But these definitely tasted the best.

-Don't trust recipes. Use my own judgment to decide what looks right or not. And look up recipe corrections for any book I own before actually making them.
-Refer to several different recipes - gives me a better sense of how much I really need. Those minute differences and ingredients really do affect everything.
-It takes a ton of failures to get to perfection (well, close to perfection). Six different attempts to finally get a cookie I liked! That's a ton of work... but no way could I have gotten my cookies had I not run into so many road blocks.
-Parchment paper > wax paper, silicone mats, flour, etc ... You can use 2 sheets to roll sticky dough (goodbye flour) and can easily slide cookies off then reuse without washing (goodbye silpat). And if you don't want to slide them off, cookies still cool better on them than silpats.
-Tall glasses are great for holding your icing.