cookies!

So last week was probably the worst week to be baking up a storm. After eating terribly for two weeks, I went a whole week without eating any processed or cooked food. It was really hard, but totally worth it. Headaches went away and I (at least started to) kick my M&Ms habit!

Soccer Mom has been baking cake pops for parties (mostly graduation parties right now). So the house is just filled to the brim with... sugar.

(I used the royal icing recipe that came with the meringue powder... A quick google search will pull up a bunch of different recipes that you can experiment with.) 

One of the parties my mom was baking for wanted both cake pops and cookies. Somehow I got pulled into the ring and ended up watching a thousand and one Youtube videos on royal icing. I've done royal icing in the past, but it was so long ago that I couldn't remember a thing.

One tutorial I found online suggested printing the letters on paper, taping a piece of wax paper over, and then piping the royal icing over the letters. I thought this was brilliant! I had made these tiny tags to go on the cake pop sticks with the girls' initials, so I used the same font for the cookie icing.

Having a steady hand is the hardest part... essentially, you're just tracing the letters. But I get so nervous doing it that my hands shake.

These were all the cookies for the girls' party. We mostly did sugar sprinkles (a family favorite), but we had some with the initials (in the back of the photo) and then we did the big F and H with the universities the girls are going to.

I wanted to thank the Kate Spade team for my graduation dress and featuring me on their blog. I was trying to think of what would be the best thing: cookies or cake pops.... I decided to go the cookie route because we had a set of cookie cutters that had the different suits of cards, which meant we had a cute little spade cookie cutter!

As if I was nervous doing the cookies for the graduation party, I was extremely nervous making the cookies for the Kate Spade team. The pressure was ON. I seriously almost cracked. I was making them at 11pm (totally normal) so I was exhausted and it was kind of dark and I was rather hungry. Poor decision in retrospect.

In my head, I had all these grand plans of how I wanted the cookies to look. But then I watched these intimidating videos about "flooding" and I was too scared. (Plus, I must say that I prefer the taste of regular cookie with a plain sugar glaze.)

I mixed the colors for the royal icing based on the Kate Spade Tahitian print:

It's hard to tell in the pictures, but the icing is really quite bright (almost neon).

Once the sugar cookies were baked and cooled, Soccer Mom helped me glaze them. Her glaze is a little bit of butter, powdered sugar, clear vanilla extract, and bit of milk. I wish I could give you a better recipe, but she seriously "feels" the glaze and knows if it's good or not... 

Confession... a bunch of my cookies did NOT make the cut. They looked terrible. But here are some of the good ones haha:

I loved the way these turned out.

Since I was mailing them up to NYC, we decided to individually package them to keep them nice and fresh! 

Woo!

Check out the Kate Spade instagram of the cookies! So happy they arrived in one piece!!!

Has anyone else experimented with royal icing?

xoxo