Scraggly cookies waiting to be baked
…And then I had finals to work through. But I promised myself that when school was done (until January, at least), I could devote myself to all things Christmas and fun. So I pulled the bucket o’ cookies out of the freezer, and after yesterday’s pig roast:
Delicious piggy
…And after creating a Cracker Barrel-worthy breakfast at home after church:
Eggs in a window, in a basket, in my belly...
…And after I said a prayer over the ones that didn’t make it:
The ones we left behind
…I separated all my thawed cookies into nice piles:
Plain cookies
I say this because this was the first year I have made true icing. My mother dumps confectioner’s sugar in a measuring cup, adding milk and stirring it with a knife until it looks right; that is the icing I grew up on. Everyone is talking about royal icing these days though, so I turned to good old Martha for a recipe. It is pretty simple:
1 pound confectioner’s sugar
2 large egg whites
Mix them together. Add water to thin if necessary.
I tried to be fancy and whip up the egg whites and then slowly added in the sugar. I didn’t use quite one pound because I was using up the end of one bag and the beginning of a two pound bag, but it came out ok. I don’t know if my fancy mixing made any difference. It was a good work out for my arm I guess.
I divided the icing up in about twelve different ways, wanting to try a variety of colors and shades. I used McCormick’s food coloring like a good girl, but I used both their traditional Assorted colors and NEON! colors. I also found this neat little tool for mixing colors on their website, but only after the fact. This is what my bowls looked like:
Sugary rainbow
The Husband was helping a friend upgrade his computer to Windows 7, so the friend’s lovely and impressively educated girlfriend helped decorate the cookies with me. I’m really glad she did because Florida is stupid warm for the middle of December, and I would have quit long before finishing from being overheated and frustrated if she weren’t around.
I put all the icing into sandwich baggies with a tiny hole in the corner and tried to pipe the icing. I don’t know if it was the wrong consistency or what, but the cookies didn’t come out quite as prettily as I would have liked. I don’t know how my friend got such nice details on her cookies; she must be much more patient than I am. If any cookies look particularly pretty, they were the ones she did.
Lovely
We also topped everything with sprinkles. I love the crunch of sprinkles on super sweet cookies.
Lovely snowmen
The snowmen exemplify my frustration with piping.
I can hear the bells...
But overall everything came out ok. And of course, the last few cookies got all the leftover icing, and all the leftover sprinkles:
Leftover cookies