Cookie Decorating Madness

After having finished nearly 50 cookies from Alice Medrich's Cookies and Brownies, you'd have thought that I was completely cookied out. Well, I am mostly, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to practice a little cookie decorating this holiday season. I had a great excuse when my friend Wynne and I decided to do a little joint cookie decorating with her nieces, and so we started planning. A few days later, we had 12 people coming over and decided to go all-out and spend the afternoon covered in royal icing.

We had two things we wanted to offer - some freestyle cookie decorating with some pre-baked cookies, as well as the baking of stained glass cookies. Out of all those folks I was the only one who'd ever done those before, and I think they're a lot of fun (and make the house smell like hard candy). We knew we had 6 kids coming from the ages of 7 to 14, and with accompanying moms and grandmas and Biscuit picking up the scraps from fallen cookies, there would be a lot of energy in the kitchen. They'd have no problem keeping themselves entertained with all the decorating goodies.

Wynne had baked 8 dozen cookies from Julia Usher's Cookie Swap (the standard sugar cookie) and I had baked a few dozen more - gingerbread, moravian spice, and butter. We made giant piles of cookies in the kitchen and set about to make and bag the icing. From 6lbs of powdered sugar (and meringue powder, not egg whites), we made white, red, green and blue icing and filled pastry bags with the goo. Wynne crushed Jolly Ranchers for the stained glass cookies and set the cider on the stove. We set out disco sugar, jimmies, edible glitter, mini chocolate chips, dragees, and sprinkles of endless variety.

When the kids arrived, things happened very quickly. I gave a quick how-to-use-the-pastry-bag demo and showed them what the different tips did. Another short walk-through in outlining and filling cookies and marbling the frosting, and off they went. Everyone got a plate and plenty of parchment placemats and went nuts.

The cookies were outstanding. There was so much good energy and happy fun that we didn't notice how much time had passed until we started cleaning up when it was all over. We're going to have to do this again next year!

Wynne has also posted some pictures of the party - check hers out too!

More Info

• Add new comment
• Printer-friendly version