One of the Christmas things I wanted to do this year was to make Christmas cookies. I got a few great books from the library and found lots of yummy-looking recipes, but when I turned to the decorating section in this Martha Stewart book (I'm not normally a Martha person, but this book is worth a look) I knew I'd found what I wanted to do. Royal icing on top of sugar cookies.
I decided to go to my tried and true Betty Crocker sugar cookie recipe and then did a little research on royal icing. Royal icing is traditionally made with powdered sugar, water, and egg whites, but for edible icing it's suggested you use meringue powder instead of the egg whites. I didn't have any meringue powder on hand so I tried searching for an appropriate substitute. I ended up using the recipe found here that calls for Ener-G egg replacer (oddly enough, I had some of that exact brand on hand, yay!). It seemed to work out pretty well, but since I've never made royal icing before I'm not sure how close it came to traditional icing. 
One note if you use the recipe, you'll need a lot more powdered sugar (I think I added maybe 1 1/2 cups more)
One note if you use the recipe, you'll need a lot more powdered sugar (I think I added maybe 1 1/2 cups more)You can find a lot of great information about decorating cookies this way at the link I provided for the icing recipes. I had so much fun doing this, and I love the way the cookies look. Much better than I've ever been able to get buttercream frosting to look! I'm planning on packaging four to six of these in some cello candy bags I have and giving them as small Christmas gifts.
2 comments:
Ah sugar cookies. I attempted making some with an egg-less recipe that was new to me (I've lost my treasured recipe!). Yeah, didn't go so well at all. They ended up tasting like burnt shortbread.
One of my Christmas list items I got to scratch off, but not enjoy. /le sigh
Yours look beautiful though!
Such beautiful cookies! That's definitely on my list for the next cookie-making event :)
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