Grand Plans
11:06 AM
Hi, my name is Ashley. I am an addict. Of butter, sugar and flour. I kid you not. I crave baked goods, usually in the form of cookies, brownies, tarts and cupcakes...although I must also be quite frank and say that my cravings frequently extend to things like icing. Not good.
But every now and then an occasion arises which NECESSITATES my baking. Like Easter. It was a must. I had to make sugar cookies for Easter. I found I had the appropriate cookie cutter designs and that being the case, felt completely justified in whipping up a batch of sugar cookies.
Next came the icing of said cookies. It is no coincidence that the Williams-Sonoma catalog arrived the same day filled with pictures of gorgeously, perfectly iced and decorated sugar cookies in the shapes of flowers, bunnies, baskets... it just fueled my fire!
So I whipped up a batch of royal icing. Except that instead of just using 4 egg whites and 1 pound of powdered sugar, I got the crazy idea to throw in some leftover butter. Huh. Well, after the required 7 minutes of hard whipping, the icing hadn't "whipped" like I remembered it doing. I believe it was the butter's fault.
So, since I'd already added a tiny bit of butter and ruined my chances of generating the icing I had in mind, I threw in more butter and some almond flavoring and said to heck with it. Let's just ice these babies as is!
Much runnier icing than originally planned, but quite tasty!
Then, my beloved husband being out of town on business, I got totally crazy and let the kids do most of the decorating. Even my 21 month August. Me being the mess-a-phobe that I am, this was big stuff. They were covered with sticky icing in the various colors we had created.
I believe August licked more than he put on the actual cookies.
And Brooklyn never quite grasped the concept of covering all of the cookie with icing (she gets this from her Dad who can never manage to fully coat the Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with their icing, either. Huge peeve of mine. Icing is the best part!) August did inherit my thoroughness...and apparent love for sugar!
And when it was all said and done, they looked absolutely nothing like the cookies I'd envisioned that would be so perfect Williams-Sonoma would beg to take pictures of them for their next catalog! What we got instead was more along the lines of tie-die, blurred colors, psychedelic, groovy Easter cookies. But you know what? They sure tasted great!
And I can't say I wasn't a teensy bit proud of my kids for mixing the colors so bizarrely. Showed some creativity. Besides, the few bunnies I attempted to really make look good - looked that way for about 5 minutes before the cute little icing smile and whiskers slid their way off the bunny. Then all I had was a bunny with a smirk.
2 comments
I think they look great! We made short bread Easter cookies this week (have yet to upload them) and I just used left over buttercream that I had in my freezer from Valentine's Day. They weren't the prettiest Easter cookies ever, but man were they decadent!
ReplyDeleteGood job on letting the kids do it themselves too! The neat freak in me tends to "help" them a little too much which kind of negates the whole experience. I applaud you!
Those are way cooler than the WS catalog!
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