Vanilla Sugar Cookies: Take One

Beautifully decorated sugar cookies are around all year long, however they seem to take center stage around the holidays. I have always wanted to try them but got a deeper urge once I realized I needed them for my daughter's birthday cake in December. So I present you my first try at sugar cookies decorated with royal icing!



The recipe I used for the cookies is from Bake at 350 and the only modification I made was substitute the almond extract with vanilla extract since I wasn't sure if the kids would like the first. Here is the recipe in case you want to check it out: Vanilla-Almond Sugar Cookies. The cookies tasted delicious but I have a lot to learn in terms of decorating them.

These were the first ones I decorated and as you can tell they are not great. My main problem here was the royal icing was too thick, I should have thinned it more. The outline was very hard to do as it almost wouldn't come out of the size 2 tip I used. When I went to do the flooding I thinned the icing but should have added even more water as you can see it ended up somewhat bumpy.

These were the next ones I decorated, and while they still need some work they look better than the initial ones. I need to work on making the edge a bit neater and matching the color better so that my mistakes aren't as noticeable. I love the polka-dots on these butterflies and couldn't have made them without this tutorial, also from Bake at 350.

Here I started to play with the polka dots, changing the sizes to see which I liked better. You can see here that I made the cookies pretty thick. For the purposes of the cake I'm making in December, they will need to be thinner. However this size is perfect for munching on!

More polka dots... as you can see I tried small ones and while I love how they look, they were much harder. Next time I try the little polka dots I'll do it at the beginning of the decorating session so that the tip of my squeeze bottle will be very clean and not clogged.

These last ones are what I need for the cake, and as you can see I played with different sizes of dots. The consensus is we like the small polka dots the best, now I just need to perfect my decorating technique to make them look a lot neater. However I'm excited to have Take One under my belt and I can't wait to try again!

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