Lollipop Flower Cookies

I followed Sweet Amb's cookie pop tutorial when making these. I baked flower shaped cookies and small oval-shaped cookies, baked with the lollipop sticks. I decorated the flower cookies and waited for them to dry completely. Then I turned them over and adhered the lollipop stick/cookie to the back of the decorated cookie with medium-consistency royal icing. It only took an hour or so to dry, and then I finished them off with a clear cellophane bag and white ribbon.

 

 

Volleyball Cookies (Including a Tutorial on Preventing Icing Craters)

Making a volleyball cookie would normally be very straightforward and take only two steps:

• Flood the entire cookie in white 
• Outline the indentations of the volleyball 

This is a fine way of doing it but drawing the outline on top of the white doesn't create that poofy, rounded shape that the sections of the volleyball normally have. In order to give the cookie this look, I needed to outline the indentations first and then fill in the spaces with white flood/20-second consistency icing second. This is how the cookies looked before I filled them in with white icing:

Outlined with gray royal icing using a Wilton #2 tip

The issue when filling these small, outlined sections is that, when the icing is left to air dry, it tends to crater and form holes. This is not a pretty look and can be very frustrating. Making the icing a thicker consistency often helps and so does running a toothpick (or scribe tool) through the spaces before the icing starts to dry. But the general consensus among experienced cookie decorators is that speeding up the drying time ("quick drying" the top of the icing) helps even more. 

Food dehydrators, fans, and space heaters are often recommended as good ways to dry the icing faster, but - with the exception of a fan - I don't own any of these. I decided to try my oven. I set my oven to its lowest temperature setting (170 degrees) and then turned it off. As soon as I filled in a cookie, I placed it on a baking sheet in the oven and let it sit for 10-15 minutes. The top of the icing dried very quickly, and I was pleased to see that no craters formed. I let one cookie air dry and set it side-by-side with an oven-dried cookie for comparison:

I used the same consistency icing for each. The oven-dried cookie was poofy, rounded and had no craters. The icing on the air-dried cookie had a few small craters and the filled spaces looked a bit sunken and dented. The icing on the oven-dried cookie was also a bit shinier than the more matte, air-dried cookie. This might be something to keep in mind when going for one look or the other.

Princess Dresses

Elsa from Frozen, Rupunzel from Tangled, Tinker Bell, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Mulan, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and Cinderella.

I used this dress cookie cutter from Copper Gifts. It's easy to make modifications to the dress shape with this particular cutter. Before I baked the dough, I trimmed off the rounded sides for Elsa and Mulan. I did the same for Tinker Bell, but I also trimmed a little off the bottom to give her dress the shape that I wanted.

Super Mario Cookies

I made these for my second youngest daughter's 4th birthday. She loves Super Mario and especially Princess Peach. It was very important to her that I made Princess Peach.

Princess Peach, of course, does not have a readily available cookie cutter as far as I could tell. I drew and cut out my own template for her and used a paring knife to cut her shape from the dough. I found the cookie cutters for Mario and Luigi here at www.cheapcookiecutters.com. I did not have a cookie cutter for the mushrooms either, but I used a large circle cutter. Once these were cut, I trimmed and shaped the bottom of the circles to make area of the stems/faces.

I outlined the characters with the help of my projector. I filled in the spaces with the appropriate colored royal icing, waited for it to dry, and then added the details with royal icing and my food dye markers.

Cute Easter Cookies

Girl Baby Shower Cookies

Tea Party Cookies

I used my Wilton Tea Party cookie cutters for these cookies. After I flooded the cookies with white icing, I let them dry for a few hours. Next I added the handles with thicker icing and a Wilton # 7 tip. I let these dry for about and house and then I used my airbrush to apply the pearl dust to add some shine to the base.

The pearl sprinkles are Wilton Sugar Pearls. I piped on the colored icing and then placed each individual pearl with my tweezers to get them in the right position. 

Rio Parrot Cookies

Easter Cookies

Hawaiian Baby Shower Cookies