Sugar Cookies and Royal Icing

Easter is fast approaching and I found a festive idea for dessert in my latest issue of Saveur magazine.  It involves making a regular pie crust, but cutting the scraps into bunny-shaped cookies that are applied to the side of the crust afterwards. The filling, in this case, was lemon curd, so it had a very spring-like colour.

I got a free cooking magazine in the mail on Friday, put out by the French-Canadian Martha Stewart, Ricardo. It actually had some decent recipes and I really liked the layout. One section was about a cake bar with five different types of cake, undecorated, and a selection of toppings to make a DIY dessert.
One of the recipes was for a lemon Bundt cake, which I made, using a cast iron mould that  yielded six smaller cakes.  There was leftover batter, so I put that in a small Bundt pan and cooked them all together. It had a crispy exterior and a crumbly and lemony (very light) interior. I gave a bunch away to a friend who had recently brought dinner over.

Small Bundt cake sandwiched between two mini-cakes.

The cake was even better the next day, so I decided to make mini Lemon Bundt cakes for Easter dessert along with Royal Icing-decorated sugar bunny cookies (already bought the cookie cutter, so may as well use it).  Using Martha Stewart's recipe, I made a half-recipe of dough yesterday and left it in the fridge overnight.

Work station for sugar cookie preparation.

The dough rolled out well and the cookie cutter was easy to work with, so I soon had forty-odd copies rolled out and cut.

Ready for baking.

I didn't get all OCD on them this time around, as it was my first-ever attempt at making sugar cookies and wanted to play around with icing them.  I even bought a set of decorator tips and disposable pastry bags.

The source of bunny anti-matter methinks.

Fresh out of the oven.

They turned out remarkably well, but I realized that I cut out different thicknesses, so had to vary the cooking time from batch to batch. Even the pale brown ones looked good though, and I thought they would be covered in icing eventually anyway, so no worries.

Outlining and Flooding

I made the Royal Icing in my Mixmaster, following Ms. Stewart's directions, but I think the icing was a a bit too runny, so next time I'll cut back on the water.  Regardless, I got the hang of using a fine tip and drawing an outline just within the perimeter, and then flooding it with icing to fill the interior. I've seen some cool pictures on the web where people have used two different colours for this part, but I wanted to keep it simple.

Simple but effective

Close-up.

After getting tired of outlining and filling so many cookies, and realizing I wouldn't have enough icing to cover them all, I came up with an easy but effective decoration that was a winner. I went back to the filled cookies, once they had dried a bit, and did the same for them.

A couple of ideas for decorating.

Next time, I'm going to make the icing thicker, so I have more control with the tips, and will try some different effects and colours, but I was pleased with my amateurish first attempt, and at least they all taste good!