How to add holiday sparkle to your cookies
You got inspired by a cookie recipe you saw online, but you thought it would taste even better without the coconut. And maybe with butterscotch. And Sheila at your book group is gluten-free. So you adapted the recipe and baked it three times before you dialed in the ingredients and baking time. You’ve made so many of these cookies that your family is ready to ask for a salad. But you finally nailed it. Your cookies taste great.
But they look like they were made by a blindfolded orangutan.
How do some people make their cookies look like works of art?
According to Kelli Wright, the secret is royal icing. Wright designs and produces custom cookies for customers, and teaches classes and workshops in cookie decorating through her business, Just Wright by Kelli (494-8472, justwrightbykelli.com). She said that unlike buttercream frosting, which tastes great but doesn’t lend itself to fine details, royal icing gives a baker more control.
“Buttercream is made from butter and sugar,” Wright said. “Royal icing is an icing. It hardens and there’s no butter in it. You can do more without it melting, so you have more capability with royal icing than you do with, say, decorating buttercream on your cookie. I think you have far more capability to create details and have them remain longer. It’s also more shelf-stable than a buttercream. When you make it correctly, the taste is just as good. It’s just a harder texture on the outside.” If you’ve watched cookie-decorating competitions on television, it is likely that the competitors used royal icing. When a contestant uses buttercream, they usually go out of their way to make a big deal about it.
Cookie Hack: Freeze the dough
The cookie dough for all three of these recipes can be saved in the refrigerator for a week or so, or for much longer in the freezer, so you don’t have to use all of it at one time. You can also make and freeze logs of cookie dough to have on hand in case of a cookie emergency.
One of the techniques that experienced cookie decorators use is something called “flooding.” They will pipe an outline on a cookie with a slightly stiff icing, then pipe looser icing inside that outline, which spreads out, or “floods” the space. When it dries, the icing provides a smooth, glossy surface that looks good on its own or provides a base to pipe more details on top of.
“It’s basically coloring in,” Wright said. “Flooding is basically coloring and filling in whatever section it is that you are doing. There are multiple consistencies in royal icing. It’s basically a really thick one when you’re doing detailed work. But there’s multiple consistencies that you use for different effects. I like to use a medium consistency, which is a little bit thicker, but I can flood with it in smaller sections. And then I use a looser consistency. to fill in, or flood. Other bakers might use a thicker consistency for both.”
Wright said different consistencies of royal icing allow a decorator to add fine details to a design. “There are multiple techniques to do any design,” she said. “One way is to outline flood and then do your details on top of that. But there is a technique called wet-on-wet where you’re using a loose consistency the entire time and the design is actually falling into your flood icing and you’re creating it all in one layer at one time.”
In Wright’s classes and workshops she has seen a spectrum of attitudes toward decorating.
“On one hand,” she said, “you just have a mix of people who just want to have fun and learn the basics, and then you have people who really want to learn. They are intent on getting the technique down right away and really intent on learning everything they absolutely can in every single class. And it can be hard in the beginning. It’s a lot harder than what you see on TV. I mean, I try to make it easier because I’ve gone through the … tribulations. I’ve learned on my own. Some people just have a natural ability to do it, and I think that’s amazing. But it took me some time to get the hang of it and adjust the consistencies to make it work for me and my style. There was a steep learning curve, but I was able to learn it on my own.”
“The best part about cookie decorating or cake decorating … and custom work like I do,” she said, “is the free form of it all. Letting it be art and realizing art, nature, everything is not about perfection.”
Royal Icing
4 2/3 cups (530 g) powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
2 Tablespoons light corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract
Mix these ingredients together, gently and slowly at first, until they come together as a thick, pipable liquid. Add more milk, a spoonful at a time, as needed, to thin it out.
Split the icing up into separate bowls depending on how many colors you will need to decorate your cookies. Stir in food coloring a few drops at a time to color each bowlful. Kelli Wright and Kate Soleau both prefer gel food coloring.
Use a piping bag or a plastic sandwich bag with the very tiniest tip of a corner cut off to pipe lines on your cookies. You can pipe or spoon more icing to “flood” it.
Wright likes to use all-natural gel-based food coloring.
“I don’t use a water-based [color] because it can alter my consistency. And then I have to remix and change my consistency. There are powdered colors out there, too. Prism, I think, is the company, or now it’s SugarArt, has beautiful powdered colors and a natural color base that people use. But there’s a whole other learning curve to go through … using the natural products because they don’t work the same as our current gel food coloring. They work very differently.”
Because Wright makes some very specific custom designs of cookies, she rarely buys cookie cutters “off the shelf” anymore.
“Etsy is kind of the place to go. I buy the STL files [from artists] on there and print them myself on my 3D printer. If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, your library might be able to print them for free, so if you find something that you really like you can always get the file and see if your local library will print it out for you.”
Kate Soleau is another custom baker, decorator and instructor. Her business is Posy Cottage Cookies (801-7590, posycottagecookies.com). She is in the process of developing online instructional content to teach elements of cookie decorating. She is a big fan of royal icing but takes a slightly different approach to adding details.
“I like to use stencils,” Soleau said. “I’ll flood the background [of a cookie], let it dry, and then come back the next day with a stencil and scrape thicker royal icing over it. When I remove it, it looks like a very cool textured look on the cookies, but it is still just using the royal icing. I’d say 90 percent of my additives on decorating are royal icing but used in different ways. So for instance I make a lot of floral transfers where I take really thick royal icing and pipe it with a piping bag with little metal tips, make flowers, and then let them dry. Later I can come back and actually pick them up and use them as homemade sprinkles or transfers to put onto cookies to enhance the look.” Soleau also uses a 3D printer to make custom stencils.
For the highly detailed work Soleau does, she rarely uses candies or sprinkles.
“But there’s a gold dust,” she said, “where you mix a powder that’s gold or silver with a little bit of vodka or Everclear [an extremely high-proof grain spirit] and then you paint it on.” She explained that the high-proof alcohol evaporates quickly and doesn’t change the flavor of the cookie.“ I do a lot of painting techniques on my cookies and I’ll use edible gold but also just use food-grade gels and do the same thing — mix them with water or Everclear, then paint the cookies. I generally use transfers and use what I have to create the decor.”
Soleau said many of the techniques she uses to decorate cookies have unexpected quirks that she only learned about with experience.
White Cutout Sugar Cookies
2 1/2 cups (300 g) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup (198 g) sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon almond extract – Yes, you could use vanilla. It’s kind of boring a classic. But the almond gives this cookie a slightly fruity background flavor.
In a medium bowl whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder. Set it aside. Its time will come.
In your stand mixer —
A quick aside: If you like to bake, or think you might like to if it were less of a hassle, it would be worth your time and money to invest in a good stand mixer. Yes, the really good ones (cough, cough, KitchenAid) can be pricey, but you can buy a reconditioned one from most manufacturers for about 30 percent less than a new one. There’s a lady at one of the flea markets I go to who has a couple of tables full of kitchen appliances. With some hard haggling and a gift doughnut, you might get a stand mixer for $100 or so. Alternatively, you can go the conventional route and get married. A good stand mixer will last longer than most marriages.
— anyway, in your stand mixer, beat the butter until it has softened slightly, then add the sugar, and beat until it is creamy, about three minutes. This is, appropriately enough, known as “creaming” the butter. Beat in the egg and almond extract.
Turn the mixer to its lowest setting, and spoon the flour mixture in, a little at a time. This is to prevent a comical poofing of flour into your face. Mix everything very briefly, just until it all comes together.
Split the dough into two lumps and wrap each with plastic wrap. Chill the dough in your refrigerator for an hour or two.
When the time comes to bake, preheat your oven to 350°F.
Flour your counter, then unwrap one of the doughballs and flatten it with the heel of your hand. You will want to flip it a couple of times and swish it around in the flour, to keep it from sticking. Use a rolling pin to roll it out to about ¼ inch thick.
If you have a large offset spatula — the kind fancy people use to frost cakes — swipe under your rolled-out cookie dough to make sure it hasn’t bonded to your counter.
Use whimsical cookie cutters to cut shapes from your sheet of dough. Transfer the cutout cookies to a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, or a silicone baking sheet. These particular cookies won’t spread too much as they bake, so you won’t need to space them out too much.
Bake each batch of cookies for 10 minutes, and let them cool on the baking sheet.
“For instance,” she said, “I’ve been dabbling in natural food-grade gels. It’s kind of like a whole science project because the pH and everything actually changes the color. So if you try to make black, sometimes it’ll come out a little purple and you add a little baking soda and it’ll change the color. So the natural gels have been challenging, but I’d really like to work more with natural colors in the future.”
Where sprinkles, miniature candies and dragees (colored sugar balls) come into their own is in decorating with children. Kristen Chinosi is the owner and chief instructor at The Culinary Playground in Derry (339-1664, culinary-playground.com), where she teaches cooking and food techniques to adults, children and mixed groups. She said that for very young children a good strategy is for an adult to bake cookies ahead of time, frost them with buttercream, and provide the kids with decorations they can press into the frosting.
“For the younger kids, you definitely want to go with just a buttercream as a base and use it as sort of a glue to hold on whatever other candies, sprinkles you’re supplying for the decorating,” she said. It’s a good idea to take a child’s age and ability into account to keep them — not to mention their parents — from getting frustrated.
“Probably not younger than 8 — more like 10 — is a really good age to start with royal icing,” Chinosi said, “because those need to be bagged. You need quite a steady hand; it’s pretty detailed work. I mean, younger kids can try it, but the frustration level can get high. If you’re doing soup-to-nuts with your Christmas cookies — meaning if you’re making your own sugar cookies, rolling it out, cutting them and frosting it — plan to make it a two-day event, because the kids will lose interest and you will be by yourself decorating cookies. So on one day you could have them help make up the dough, maybe later that day you roll it out, cut the cookies, set them aside. The next day, make up your frosting, or if you’re using a canned frosting that’s fine too. They’re littles, right? And then have like a decorating party. And what we like to do is use muffin tins and we’ll line them with like the paper liners and put different types of candies or sprinkles so the children have kind of like a whole little array.”
Old-fashioned gingerbread cutout cookies
1 Tablespoon ground ginger
1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper – after you’ve made this recipe once or twice, you might want to use more black pepper, or even, if you’re feeling adventurous, ground Szechuan pepper.
5 cups (600 g) whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda – If you were wondering why this recipe uses baking soda instead of baking powder (and let’s face it; you probably weren’t), it’s because the molasses is slightly acidic, so the slightly alkaline baking soda will work better in this particular application.
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup (198 g) brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup (340 g) molasses
See if this seems familiar:
Whisk the spices, flour, baking soda and salt together in a medium bowl and set it aside.
Cream the butter and brown sugar together, then beat in the egg and molasses.
Add the flour mixture, a couple of spoonfuls at a time, and mix everything until the dough just barely comes together. Divide the dough, wrap it, and chill it.
Roll the dough out, and cut out shapes with cookie cutters, then bake at 350°F for 10 minutes, and let them cool on the baking sheet.
If you own an old-fashioned, wooden cookie mold, this dough works extremely well using that. Just remember to brush the inside of the mold with vegetable oil before you start, and with flour Every Single Time thereafter.
These are, as promised by their name, classic, old-fashioned gingerbread cookies, spicy and not too sweet, perfect for decorating in full color or with traditional minimalist white icing.
