This week was the most challenging so far, but I'm satisfied with the result. My dad had never made these cookies before, so this time I was on my own.
The sugar cookies had pretty basic ingredients other than the substantial amount of flour - 2 1/2 cups. The challenging part was making the royal icing I had decided the cookies needed. Royal icing wasn't a recipe that my recipe in my book, so I used this recipe from online, which worked out fine. I didn't know that you could get pasteurized egg whites by themselves - which the icing called for - but apparently you can.
For being very basic cookies, mixing the cookie dough was pretty simple. After chilling the dough, I had to roll it out, which was much more difficult. While doing some research, I found out that a good strategy for rolling and cutting out cookies is to do it on the same parchment paper/pan you're using to bake them on. Using this method worked pretty well! Mixing the icing was a little more difficult, as over mixing can heavily affect the consistency. Despite that, I think I did pretty well (I forgot to take pictures of that, oops!)
After cutting out the cookies with the bug shaped cookie cutters, I had to decide how long to bake them for. The recipe says 6-8 minutes, but in my experience the recipes I've used have notoriously over baked my cookies. To my surprise, some of the batches went over 8 minutes. The amount of time you need to bake for really depends on the thickness of the cookies, which I wasn't very consistent on. The butterfly shaped cookies seemed to burn the most, while the ladybug shaped cookies were the most under baked. In addition, icing the cookies was new for me, as I've never decorated anything complicated. I believe I did pretty well for my first attempt.
This is usually where I would make a list to follow for next week's improvements, but there doesn't seem to be anything I can improve. So for next week, I'll be moving on from regular sugar cookies. Using the same recipe as sugar cookies, I'll be making chocolate pinwheels. These will require a lot more technical skill than the past five weeks, so I think they are a good test for what I've learned so far.
Come back next week for hopefully better bakin'!
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About the AuthorI'm Kai Page and I'm just trying to get better at baking cookies! ArchivesCategories |