We have been having some technical difficulties that resulted in a change in hosting companies, so this post has been sitting around waiting for us to get up and running again.
Yep… you read that right Cupcake
Cookies. Not cupcakes… although I do have to make cupcakes soon… it has been way to long. Anyway, I have been wanting to make some royal iced cookies for a while and when we were in Chicago in January we went into
Crate and Barrel and I found these cute
cupcake cookie cutters for under $3.00! I had to have them! I thought these were perfect for making some royal-iced cookies.
So, fast forward 2 months later and finally… since it was my mom’s birthday I thought I would make some cookies and send them to her.  One of the sites I really enjoy for all things royal-iced cookie is Sweetopia! I used a sugar cookie recipe from the site and the royal icing recipe that they recommend, which is originally from antonia74. Even though the sugar cookie dough recipe contains baking powder, Marion suggests not using any baking powder so the cookies don’t spread when they bake. I left it out and I was pretty happy with how my cookies came out (and tasted!) so I will never include baking powder in my sugar cookies. I also placed the cut-outs in the frdige for a while before placing them in the oven and I think that helps as well!
I made one batch of royal icing. I wasn’t sure if this would be enough, but I figured I could always make a second batch if I needed to. I figured I’d do the icing part of my cupcake cookie in white since I usually ice my cupcakes with cream cheese icing and then I would die the rest of the royal icing pink and brown. Not sure why I decided on pink, but I wanted an additional color and I think I had seen it on cookies similar to these somewhere and thought it looked good. I’m glad I only made one batch of icing because it was more than enough. I didn’t do anything too fancy. I did pipe some lines on the liner part of the cupcake after the main flooded section had dried, but that was the extent of my fanciness on these. I also sprinkled a variety of sugars and sprinkles on the white “icing.” Once again,
sweetopia has some great
tutorials on decorating with royal icing. I followed the direction there and didn’t use two different icing consistencies. I used the same icing for piping my outing and for flooding the inside. It made it much easier than trying to worry about having two consistencies of each color. That would have taken forever! I used a Wilton #3 tip for the piping and the flooding.
All in all, I think these came out pretty good. I was pretty happy with them. Once thing I am not good at though (and don’t know if I ever will be) if keeping my work area (or myself) very clean while working. I really want to get better at this. I feel like things get so messy and there is so much to clean up that when I am all done I sort of regret the whole process because it takes me just as long to clean as it did to make all the cookies! :-( This time around I even ended up with royal icing on my lucky hat. I suppose maybe that makes it even luckier.
Luckily I was able to clean my lucky hat without to much trouble. I then decided to package up my cookies. Not only was I goign to send them to my mom, it was also a freind’s birthday and a few of us had a plan to go to a movie. So, I figure I would bring along some birthday cookies. I packed them up and secured them with some curling ribbon.
When I talked to my mom she said that they made it to NY okay. They didn’t break too much. We had a few of them around for a few days and I actually think they actually tasted better as the days went on. I thougth they might start getting stale, but to my surprise they didn’t. I  will definitely make cookies like this again. I was thinking I might do some shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day, but I’m not sure if I will have time…. Next week is a little busy since it is the first week back after Spring Break and I am leaving for a conference on Friday. So, we’ll see.
