Cookies as an art form?

 After making cookies with the girls last week, and spending WAY too much time on Pinterest looking at gorgeously decorated cookies, I decided that I would make my first serious foray into cookie decoration.  I spent a couple of days researching Royal Icing recipes (and settled on one from the Sweetopia blog) and trying to find the perfect sugar cookie recipe (snagged from Allrecipes ) I felt like I was ready to give it a whirl. 

On Tuesday morning I made up a batch of sugar cookie dough and put it in the fridge to chill.  That afternoon, I started baking my cookies...and shooing away the children it seemed to draw.  I declared the sugar cookies off limits, and no kids would be allowed to help.  These were Mom's cookies to decorate!  (I'm not a complete ogre...I did toss a pan of chocolate chip cookies from a tub in the oven for them to nibble on)

The baking went fairly well, after I worked out a method for rolling out the slightly sticky dough.  I found it best to roll them out on my silicone baking sheets, cut them out there, and just pick up the excess dough.  No transferring the cookies and ruining the shape.  I did, however, find out that 2 of my silicone sheets get lumpy in the oven and that distorted some of my shapes.   

During all the baking and such, I watched some videos, also on Sweetopia, on icing consistency, piping straight lines, and flooding techniques.  I was armed and ready to make my cookies into works of art!  I made a big batch of Royal Icing and tinted small portions of it.  I also discovered that I need more piping tips, and that icing glazes over pretty quickly. 

Even after all my video watching on the correct icing consistency, I still managed to get it too thick.  It did ok for piping lines, with the exception of the #1 tip...it got clogged easily.  But for flooding it was way too thick.  I ended up squeezing it out into bowls, thinning it with water, and painting it on with some new, clean paint brushes. 

Here are some of the cookies in the in-between stages.  First, I piped in the outlines and let it dry to the touch.  Then, I flooded the cookies with one color at a time. 

These are some of the finished cookies.  I experimented with wet on wet techniques (piping a different color onto wet flooded color), marbling (piping stripes onto wet icing and dragging a toothpick through it), and wet on dry (it makes a 3D type decoration).  It was fun, but extremely time consuming this go around.  I learned a ton, though, and I think that next time will go faster and more smoothly.