30th Birthday Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing Glaze

Yep. Manly cookies.  I'm drawn to cutesy or girly.  These seem so boring, but I guess it appeals to dudes.

The numbers were RIG transfers.

Circles.  The bane of my cookie existence.  How can such a simple shape be so complicated?

This whole set was more difficult than I had anticipated.  Minis with "30" on them.  Easy, right?  Not so much, at least for me.  Getting the circles to look circular, getting the numbers all the same.  In the end, I think they came out well.

I sure do love that banner cutter!  From now on though, I think it should only be used for shorter messages.  The text is pretty small here.

Engagement Party Love Bird Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing Glaze

These are cookies that I made for my sister's engagement party.  I added lemon zest to the sugar cookie dough and lemon juice to the royal icing glaze.  Yum!

There are those love birds again!  I sure do love them.  I used SweetP's tutorial.  She uses transfers for the wings.  This is the first time that I did that for these birds.  Love it!

Um, should the wings be facing the other way?  I think so.  Oops.

Simple wet-on-wet dot flowers adorned the mini hearts.

The leftover transfers were used on mini rounds.

I used my new cake cutter from Plastics in Print.  What a great cutter that is!  Don't look at the icing mess I made of the stand.  For some reason that icing was really thick.  I tried to make it work but failed.  I scraped it off to try again, but it broke!

Oh well.  You can see it on the platter here with no stand.  It's still cute.

As I was plating them, I realized that I should have put half the flowers on the right side of the hearts and half on the left.  You know what I mean?  That would have made a nicer looking platter.  I love symmetry!

Want to see a bit of my sister's party? It was at my parent's house.  This is just one of the tables of food.  The savory stuff.  My mom made the table runners in a fabric that we picked out.  That fabric served as the inspiration for all of the decorating.  See that big square?  That's their existing artwork that we covered in leftover fabric.  It was my Mom's idea, which I thought was insane at first, then loved it!  The circles hanging was a wacky idea of mine.  I had planned on just hanging it on a wall somewhere.  I sewed paper circles in rows, tied them to a ribbon, and hung them at the top of the square.  We added a photo and a few rounds of red later.

This.  This cake was made by my 17 year old niece!  Isn't she amazing?  I wish you could see it better.  Swirled roses and beautiful piping.  Four layers!  She works in a bread bakery.  A girl after my own heart!

The tall glass jars later had sand and votive candles in them.  They looked really pretty both inside and outside.  The shorter jars held tableware.

These are paper flowers that I made.  I had no idea what I was going to do with them.  It's amazing what ideas come just by looking around at what you already have.  I used wooden skewers as the stems and tiny wooden candlesticks as the base.

Below are those sewn circle bannery hanging things. 

The rectangle cards were used to identify the dishes.  My Dad wrote the name of each dish on the cards with his architect handwriting.  You know that old-school perfect handwriting?  All caps?  I've always loved the way he writes.

The rounds were printed with the couple's names and strewn about the place.

Making all of these decorations was really fun.  We purchased a pack of scrapbooking paper that matched our inspiration fabric and I just tried to come up with a bunch of things to do with it!

The party was a great success.  Lots of family and friends.  LOTS of food. 

There were only a small handful of my cookies left at the end of the party.  Those were wrapped up by two of the remaining guests to take home.  That's always fun to see!

Cowboy Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing Glaze

I made these for my cousin's sweet little one's first birthday. They were so fun to decorate.

I used RIG again and am still loving everything about it!

I was quite disappointed with the "Happy Birthday" cookie.  I wanted it to look like rope.  I painted the brown lines on with airbrush coloring.  Unfortunately the point of my paintbrush wasn't fine enough.  It's messy looking and blends in too much with the background.  I switched to  a different brush for the rope on the cowboy hats.  So much better!  I should have tested on one of those first, huh?

Here's the whole platter with bandana prints, cow prints, cowboy hats, sheriff stars and number one cookies ....

Mice and Swiss Cheese Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing Glaze

A friend of mine bought the sweetest little mouse cutter for me so of course I had to make cookies for her.

These mice are supposed to have cute little tails.  Unfortunately they were lost in some horrible dough / cookie cutter accidents.  I just couldn't get them to release from the cutter without breaking!  I almost scrapped the whole project, then decided to just pipe the tails on with icing.  I think that it worked out just fine in the end!

So what goes with mice? Swiss cheese of course!  Call me crazy, but I think these little squares of cheese came out quite cute!

Can you tell what cutter I used for the mice heads?  Yep, a small heart.  That's a design by the brilliant Sugarbelle.

I had some major cratering on the mouse ears.  I tried to cover them with dots.  Thicker icing should help with that next time.

I haven't even mentioned the HUGE departure for me with this set.  I didn't use royal icing.  I used royal icing glaze!  An invention of the brilliant DippinPops AKA SweetP.  Here's her recipe.

It combines all of the benefits that royal icing and glaze have with none of the drawbacks.  I LOVED it.  This royal icing glaze (RIG) has the addition of corn syrup, glycerine, and cream of tartar.  It has a beautiful shine and elasticity to it.  It dries hard enough to stack but has a soft bite.  Not crunchy at all and delicious.  It stores amazingly well.  There was virtually no separation the next day.  Notice that it looks like royal icing.  It doesn't have the translucent look of glaze.

I'm going to keep playing with this, modifying the recipe a bit so that I get the consistency that works best for me.  I just may be a RIG convert.  Give it a try!

Cookie Decorating Class in Frederick, MD

I'll be teaching another class on the basics of decorating sugar cookies with royal icing!  It will be held at The Kitchen Studio Cooking School in Frederick, MD on Thursday, October 4, 2012 from 6:30 to 9:30 pm.  You can sign up here.

I'll be teaching how to make royal icing, get it to the right consistency, color it, and then decorate cookies like this for Halloween . . .

It's going to be great fun!

Mason Jar and Flowers Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

I recently ordered a whole bunch of cutters from Plastics in Print (closed for right now).

One of the cutters that I was excited to test out was the mason / canning jar.  I've seen one used as a vase for flowers in cookie form many times.  I wanted to give it a shot too.

I love how it came out.  Of course I used my KopyKake to write "Ball".  Gosh I'm thankful for that thing.  Writing like this just wouldn't be possible for me without it.

I considered piping stems down through the jar, but decided against it.  I wasn't sure if I could pull it off successfully.

The jar is the smaller of the two that PIP offers.  It's just three inches tall.

This is a small platter.  I think it would be nice for Mother's Day, Get Well, maybe a teacher gift.

But how would a row of jars look if these were to be for a party? 

Meh.  Too much empty space.  I think that it would be cuter to have three separate small plates to display on a dessert table.

Love PIP and love my jar cutter!