The first batch I made was a standard sugar cookie dough, with some green food coloring added to make it a great Irish green color. I used poured sugar icing and dusted them with sanding sugar. Yum.
For this type of slightly thicker icing, I like to ice the cookies using a condiment jar rather then a pastry bag as it gives me a little more control.
The second batch of cookies were regular sugar cookies with royal icing. I made white and green royal icing to top them. One thing that I was not happy about in my last round of cookie making (Valentine's Day) was the tinting of my icing. Last time I made a batch of piping icing, and then a separate batch of flooding icing. The problem was that they never exactly matched up the same color of icing. So this time around I was focused on finding a solution. For my green icing, I made a big batch of green icing, poured the thicker, piping icing into the pastry bag, then then just added some water to the already-tinted green to make it a little looser for the flooding part. I was happy with the color-matching result, since both the piping and flooding icing was made from the same batch of green icing. However, by adding so much water to the royal icing, I found that it did not dry as hard as royal icing should. I think next time I will still do the one big batch of color icing, but just add a little less water.
Here are some pictures of my piping work. I used a #3 tip with my pastry bag.
After all the cookies are piped with the thicker icing, then I go back and flood in the middles using a slightly more watered down version, dragging the icing out to meet the outline using a toothpick.
I really wanted to use these cookies to practice just about everything--from perfecting the actual cookie recipie, to working out all the little nuances that go along with making royal icing, to even trying out some new icing techniques. The first one I wanted to try is something called color flow. It's when you pipe on an additional color of icing and you use a toothpick to drag lines through the icing to create designs. The theory seemed easy enough, and I've seen some beautiful color flow designs in books and other blogs, but it was harder then I thought it would be. The lines of icing you pipe have to be a little smaller (I think maybe I should have switched tips to a #2) and you really have to be careful not to drag the toothpick through the original color. Anyway, I will keep practicing this one, because when you get it right, they look really awesome!
The second technique that I wanted to practice is called wet on wet. It's when after you pipe and flood your first color, you simply add another color in a design while the royal icing is still wet. I tried wet on wet with polka dots and stripes and they turned out really cute. The dots were much better then the stripes as I still have to work on doing nice, steady, even straight lines using the pastry bags/decorating tips. But now that I understand the technique, I will definitely use it again with more designs!
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