You need a schedule and a plan.
I know this makes me sound uptight and micromanaging, but there’s not much to do about that. It’s just how it is. If I didn’t warn you, you might go sauntering off to the grocery store in the morning and expect to have perfectly set, intricately decorated sugar cookies later that night. And instead, a mound of dirty dishes would overtake your kitchen as the day crumbled before you.
I like to make decorated sugar cookies over the course of three days, with a royal icing plan that has either a flooding stage only or a flooding stage and a piping stage. As long as you have a general idea of what the flooding stage and piping stage of your cookie set should look like, you can work out the details right before doing it.
Day 1: Prep
1. Let your cookie dough ingredients come to room temperature.2. While this happens, make a batch of royal icing.
If you plan on using black or red icing, go ahead and color as much as you’ll need now.
The advantage of making royal icing at least a day before you use it is that many of the air bubbles will rise to the surface, and you can pop them before they destroy your cookies. Royal icing from the stand mixer starts off on the thicker side, and it should be stored that way in an airtight container. All colors will deepen over time, but this deepening isn’t normally required for colors other than red and black. You could color all of your icing at this stage, but you’ll have to stir before decorating anyway, so I normally skip the chore of using many containers and stirring everything twice.
3. Cover your icing well and store at room temperature or in the refrigerator until the next day.
Many people recommend placing plastic wrap on the surface of the icing, but as long as the container is small enough that it doesn’t trap in a lot of extra air, I think it’s fine to skip that step. That being said, always check your icing before using it, and discard any parts that might have crusted over.
4. Make your sugar cookie dough.
Once your stand mixer bowl rinses clean, you can make your cookie dough. Note that cleaning the bowl after making cookie dough is a lot more laborious than cleaning it after making royal icing, so do yourself a favor and make the icing first. The dishwasher can do the hard part.
5. Wrap your dough tightly and chill it in the fridge for a couple of hours.
6. Clean up the kitchen and clear out some space in your freezer.
7. Set up your rolling station.
You'll need a rolling mat, a rolling pin, extra flour, cookie cutters, and a couple of flat surfaces like cutting boards or cookie trays that will fit in your freezer.
8. Cut your cookie dough in half and work with one piece at a time, keeping the rest chilled.
9. Using your pastry skills, roll out the dough smoothly but quickly so that it stays cold.
10. Cut your cookies and freeze them on a flat surface.
Sugar cookies that will be covered in royal icing are typically rolled to a quarter inch. This is a little on the thick side, but the cookies are sturdier, transfer without misshaping more easily, and ultimately taste more balanced with all the icing.
11. Meld the dough scraps into a ball, flatten, and place in the freezer.
12. Using the second half of your dough, roll, cut, and freeze the second batch of cookies.
13. Melding the second batch of dough scraps with the ones in the freezer, roll out another batch.
14. Cut out a third batch of cookies and freeze them.
I don’t re-roll my scraps for shaped cookies more than once because overworking the dough can make the cookies tough, and sometimes third-rolled cookies bake with bumpy tops anyway.
15. Roll out your remaining scraps one more time.
16. Using a knife, cut this batch into rectangular scrap cookies.
17. Once all your cookies are frozen flat, store them frozen and unbaked.
I like to place them in an airtight container with parchment paper between each layer of cookies.
18. Clean your kitchen for the second time and pour yourself a glass of wine.
Aren’t you glad you’re on a 3 day plan?
Scrap cookies are handy to have for testing icing consistencies and taste testing at the end of the project to ensure your final cookies are up to snuff. Frozen cookies require nearly no effort at all to bake, and it’s okay if several days pass between Day 1 and Day 2.
Day 2: Flooding
1. Write down an ordered set of steps for your decorating tasks for the day.Flooding your cookies may require several steps, and it's important to order them as efficiently as possible. Strategize on giving adjacent cookie sections enough drying time if you don’t want them running together. Strategize on making just a few colors at a time if you can. In fact, if you can use any of the colors you’re finished with to help make a new color, do that. This will not only save on dishes and create less leftover colored icing, but it will also help to create a more coordinated color palate within your set. Taking a break once you’ve finished a piping task to mix a new color isn’t a bad idea either. Nobody else on the internet seems to like that approach; they’d rather work with about seven colors at once. I would work with seven colors at once if it were necessary for my design, but I don’t see the point in doing that otherwise. A wet cloth thrown over your mixing bowl and spatula will keep them from crusting over while you work.
2. Bake and cool frozen cookies.
Baking cookies from a frozen state preserves the shapes very nicely. You may have to add a minute or two to the baking time, and I like to wait until my cookies to have a golden edged border. Many people prefer them a little whiter and un-toasted, which is perfectly fine as well. The internet tells you that if your cookies haven’t baked with even tops, you can press down on your cookies with a fondant smoother. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Frozen cookies not thrice rolled should bake pretty flat in the first place, and if they don’t, a fondant smoother isn’t about to work miracles. But there’s a useless tip if it suits you.
3. Prepare a decorating station.
For your decorating station, you will need your written plan, your royal icing, bowls and a small rubber spatula for mixing, a small bowl of water with a 1/8th teaspoon measurer to help thin your icing, gel colors, piping bags and/or bottles, a dehydrator, and a small silpat or clean area dedicated to the cookie of your focus. Next to your silpat, you will want at least one damp cloth and any tools you favor such as scribes, mini silicone spatulas, small offset spatulas, and/or paintbrushes. I also like to use a special tray to help hold and organize my icings, but that’s not necessary.
It’s important to set out the right piping tools for your tasks. Cookie decorating silicone bottles come with two differently sized tops, each of which has a cap, enabling them to store upside-down in trays very nicely. They’re semi-transparent, squishy, and easy to hold. You can pipe quickly with them, and if your icing is thick enough, you can scribe it into place with no outline successfully. For big bold filling jobs, such as filling hearts, circles, or squares, these are your friends.
If your flooding areas have trickier shapes, or your wet on wet plan is detailed, your flooding plan is going to require a little more finesse. Enter parchment cones. Many people use tipless plastic piping bags, but if you're going tipless, I don’t see why parchment cones aren’t better in every way. They’re cheaper and less of a burden on the environment. Most importantly, they’re clearly more bad-ass. I make mine with a single staple, and with the help of a paper cutter, they come together in no time. Parchment queens usually feel secure with the ripped notch, but they're really living on the edge; remember what I said about bad-ass? Again, I go with the staple. In the realm of coolness as it applies to cookie decorators, I'm too cool for plastic, but not cool enough for the notch.
Plastic piping bags, on the other hand, are best for any time using or switching piping tips may be necessary because they hold couplers securely in place. Neither silicone bottles nor plastic bags with piping tips offer much control when they’re nearly out of icing, but parchment cones are warriors.
4. Fill a large mixing bowl with water and a little dish soap and place it in the sink.
I like to throw everything I’m done with into this bowl. Because royal icing is fat free, it cleans itself up pretty effortlessly. The bowl makes it easier to soak bottles and bowls and harder for little piping tips to find themselves down the drain.
5. Stirring gently, color and thin royal icing to the consistencies of your plan.
6. Fill piping bag or bottles and secure them well.
7. Flood cookies or decorate with wet on wet techniques.
Remember to only mix as many colors as you need at a time. It’s likely that your flooding icing will all be some sort of medium consistency. I like using medium-thick so that I can build up my layer fairly high without it spilling over the edge of the cookie. The higher I can layer my icing, the more level it tends to settle.
8. Let iced cookies dry in your dehydrator at 95 F.
9. Mix the next colors you need and straighten up.
10. Repeat mixing and flooding and cleaning until all your cookies are flooded.
11. With whatever colors you have in surplus, flood all your scrap cookies.
12. Once all the cookies are matte, transfer them to a tray and let them dry overnight in a closed oven.
13. Store your icing and clean up for the last time.
14. Did you finish that bottle of wine from yesterday?
Unless you want to use any of your flooding colors on Day 3, simply put all your leftover medium icing into a clean, dry, airtight container. I usually mix it together first, even though it will need to be remixed before using in a future project. After throwing away disposable items like parchment cones and soaking icing tools in the big mixing bowl, clean up should be a breeze. Windex the counter and finish hand washing what’s in that mixing bowl, and you should be set.
At the end of the day, you should have an oven full of flooded cookies, some clean dishes, some sticky, damp towels for the wash, one container of miscellaneous icings, another container of thick, unused white icing, and any number of colored icings separately stored for Day 3.
Day 3: Piping & Packaging
1. Again, write down an ordered set of steps for your decorating tasks for the day.2. Prepare a decorating station with piping bags and a food dehydrator.
Most of the work is already done, and your cookies should be well dried.
Your decorating station will be just like what it was in the flooding day, but typically you’re using very small quantities of icing and perhaps different tools. When I wake up on Day 3, I typically have parchment cones on the mind. I find that for piping thin lines, medium thin icing flows well and also creates well rounded dotted borders. On the other hand, stenciling techniques or decorations that need to hold their shape from special piping tips such as leaf tips or petal tips need very stiff icing. Some people use airbrushes at this point of the decorating process, but I don’t. Because I’m either using fairly thin lines or piping with thick icing, this stage dries for me very quickly.
3. Stirring gently, color and thin royal icing to the consistencies of your plan.
4. As before, only mix as many colors as you need at a time.
5. Finish decorating cookies with piped details.
6. Let finished cookies dry in dehydrator at 95 F.
7. Allow ample time for drying.
Contrary to what the internet says, this doesn’t require another overnight.
8. Once cookies are very dry, preheat oven to 170 F.
9. Place finished cookies in the oven and turn off the heat.
Austin has a “humid subtropical climate,” which means maybe I shouldn’t be making decorated sugar cookies in the first place. From the moisture in the air as well as the moisture in the icing, I think sugar cookies can get a little soggy, which is why I store them in the dehydrator and the oven. To further combat extra moisture, I give them one very gentle final toast before letting them cool and packaging them. To make sure that the toast improves your cookie, test it first with a scrap cookie.
UPDATE! After we got a dehydrator for the house, I found this step to be no longer necessary. It all depends on your environment!
10. Once your cookies come to room temperature, seal them in individual airtight plastic bags.
11. Finish packaging your set and tidy up the kitchen for the last time.
12. Take pictures of your cookies! You earned this.
I package my cookies in self sealing bags or heat seal cellophane bags because I don’t trust a ribbon to do its job. It works out nicely that this is the shortest day, as generally speaking, it’s easy to underestimate the time packaging requires.
When all is said and done, you should have a set of packaged cookies to gift or sell, some extra scrap cookies to share with your family, a rather small container of thick royal icing to be added to your next batch of white, and a container of leftover colors, which usually results in brown. Brown is by no means a bad color. Not only is it a necessary color for nature themed cookies (tree trunks, leaf veins, apple stems, acorns, etc.), it’s gorgeous paired in a set with light pastels (just think of soft pink, white, and dark brown. Beautiful!). You can also use it instead of brown food coloring to turn brighter primaries into a more sophisticated and natural looking set. Brown icing can be dyed black with very little effort. Leftover royal icing is often stored in the pantry, but I tend to keep mine in the fridge. Remember that the colors will deepen over time, the icing will probably get less stiff, and it will need to be remixed. It takes a very, very long time to go bad, and you'll be able to smell a problem if there is one. If you don't like wasting your icing and you don't want to store it, you can always make royal icing transfers, which last years if properly stored in a dry environment, like an airtight container with a little packet of rice.
Here's my first sugar cookie commission, ordered by my fabulous friend Melissa. She's also the inspiration behind my first LL bake, the doggie cakes. What a gal.
Originally Posted on Wix 19 Sep 2021
SUGAR COOKIES AGAIN
I hate making sugar cookies so much, except that actually I must love it, or I wouldn't keep doing it and I definitely wouldn't keep writing about it. I volunteer to repair books at my kids' school library, and at the end of last year, their fabulous librarian Mrs. B gifted me, among other things, a cookie from Hayley Cakes and Cookies. It was so lovely that I went out and bought Hayley's cookbook, Sweet Talk Cookies over the summer. That book taught me THREE things!!! That's a lot of things! So many, in fact, that felt the need to share them all with you. I'd highly recommend buying her book if you're curious on how a professional does it for a shop.First, Hayley taught me to put a little cream cheese in my cookie dough, which I find not only keeps my dough a little more pliable, but also more re-rollable. I think the idea was to get a softer bite, but I'm more excited about the first two points.
Second, Hayley taught me to suck it up and mix separate piping and flooding icings instead of sticking with the 15-20 second consistency that can do both. Now that I've done it a few times, I really love how fast flooding can be. Don't get me wrong - it still takes a los of time, but it is noticeably faster. Hayley floods with a glaze icing instead of a royal icing, which dries softer (but hard enough) without the use of glycerin, and that's nifty. I use a mix; once I've finished piping my outlines, I use that royal icing to help color my glaze. After all, Nellie Lovett was known for being practical.
Third, Hayley told me to just get the PME tips and plastic coupler bottles and stop being so cheap about it. I did, and she was totally right. The PME tips are much smoother for outlining than Wilton, and I have to admit that while I still love my silicone bottles for all sorts of things, I also love being able to switch tips on a bottle!
If you're interested enough to read this but not so interested that you want to try it out yourself, go by Hayley's Cakes and Cookies and just treat yourself to one of their cookies. You won't be sorry.
Originally Posted on Wix 07 Sep 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment