In the future, buy supplies and mix/bake cookies the night before. Then begin decorating right after breakfast so you don't run out of time and end up with the cookies below.
Love, me
Yep, I didn't quite get as much done as I'd hoped. I didn't realize I'd have to go to Michael's for cake decorating products; I'm 24 and have never really done this so I figured I could pick up everything I needed at Target.
False.
After making shopping lists of everything I'd need for the cookies and researching online to find out where I could buy it, I decided to start at Target and then make a trip to Michael's, if needed.
Let's just say Target doesn't carry specific decorating tips, squeeze bottles, specific shades of food coloring, etc. They do, however, carry the break-n-bake cookie dough, so I popped the cookies in the oven when I got home from Target (4 mins away) and asked Real HouseMom to take them out of the oven when the timer went off. Meanwhile I raced to Michael's (12 mins away), which ended up being a mecca for those who are craft-oriented (or pretending to be).
Long story short, once I got home I made royal icing, mixed the food coloring into it and outlined the cookies. It took about 4-5, um, unique cookies before I finally got the hang of it! .....sort of.
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| The outlined cookies (stop judging) |
While the piped outlines dried, I added water to the royal icing and put it in the squeeze bottle so I could flood the cookies. It was working well! Until my friend K showed up so we could go to dinner.... About 8 cookies after she arrived, I ran out of watered-down royal icing, so I decided we'd go to dinner, let the flooded cookies set and then I could finish when we got home.
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| The filled-in cookies (and the ones that were left after I ran out of flooded icing) |
Welllllll we got home from dinner (Buffalo Wild Wings boneless Thursday!) and only had a few hours to go, so I made the executive decision to forgo finishing the cookies in favor of watching Deathly Hallows: part 1 and painting our nails in Gryffindor colors. For about $1 each from Target (duh), I got "scarlet" (New York Color in #228 Chelsea) and "gold" (Sinful Colors in #955 Pull Over).
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| My first experiment with polka dot nails could've been better... but probably could've been worse |
About 10:30, we decided to head to the theater to get seats and oh my goodness was it packed!! The theater near my house (across the street from my Target, actually) is a 30-screen jumbo theater-- and Deathly Hallows: part 2 was playing on 17 screens. No joke, over half of the entire place was total HP mania!
The movie was really good (the book was better, duh!) and the people at the movie were a little over-the-top (aka I wanted to throw some of the chanting, screaming not-yet-lost-my-baby-fat tweens & teens down the stairs) but overall we had a great time!
And for the future, I now know that seriously decorated cookies need some advance preparation...
Again, here's what helped me make these cookies:
- Harry Potter character cookies from Bridget @ Bake at 350
- Super duper unfortunately, I didn't see her recipe for BUTTERBEER cookies (OMG I know) until the next day, otherwise I would've attempted those too! =(
- A weird cross-check of royal icing recipes from these three sites:
- Royal Icing 102 or 201 or whatever [also from Bridget]
- Royal Icing recipe from Wilton [the main one I followed]
- Royal Icing recipe from JoyofBaking.com [this one was mostly just to cross-reference measurements]
Have a great Monday =)
-Jules
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