Spring has sprung

Happy Easter!

In the rush of preparing Easter dinner, I forgot to take any pictures of the process I went through making these cute little guys, but because I tried a new technique (and because I think they are pretty), I figured I would talk about them anyway.

I used a basic sugar cookie recipe for the cookies.  Nothing fancy.  The original recipe is supposed to make 5 dozen cookies (which was way more than I wanted to make), so I thought I would be all clever and use the website's recipe conversion to scale it down a bit.  Unfortunately I did not save those changes so when I went to print the recipe later, it was a full batch (which of course I didn't notice until the butter and sugar were already creamed).  But when is more cookie dough really that much of a problem??  I baked half of the recipe, and froze the rest for later.  Problem solved!  And, now I have homemade cut-and-bake cookies whenever I want them-- even better!

Making these cookies was somewhat of a last-minute task, so I had to pick and choose the "Springiest" (let's just pretend that's a word, shall we?) of the cookie cutters I already had.  Hence the rather odd combination of sizes.

Now that I had a bunch of cookies, I needed to decide on a kind of icing.  Again, sort of a last-minute thing, so I didn't have the cream cheese for my usual go-to frosting recipe.  This gave me an excuse to try Royal Icing, which I had only done once before--for the halloween faux cupcakes and cakes.  In particular, I was interested to try flooding, which is a technique that involves outlining the cookie in icing to create a dam, and then filling it in with thinned icing to create a smooth finish.  

Although mine did not have the satiny-smooth finish some decorators can achieve, I am happy with the results for a first try.  To do more details would require long set-up times, but I think I will give that a shot sometime relatively soon.  The possibilities are practically limitless!  (Also an advantage of Royal Icing:  It is completely shelf-stable, so no worries about refrigeration or spoilage!)

I haven't made cookies in awhile...I like cookies.  I'm happy I have more awaiting me in the freezer.  : )