Happy Flower Cookies for a Rainy Day!

Since it was raining all weekend last week I decided to make some yummy sugar cookies to brighten our day! Plus, I wanted to try out a royal icing technique I had found online. The cookies were DELICIOUS! I usually roll them out to about 1/8 inch. However I tried making them a little thicker this time and rolled them to about 1/4 inch. They were so moist they almost fell apart and the flavor was just sweet enough! I used almond extract for the flavoring and it was perfect. Here they are just out of the oven:

 After they had cooled I started outlining the cookies with royal icing. This is the technique I had read online. When you outline the cookies and allow the outline to dry before flooding the cookie, it will give a more crisp appearance to the decoration.

I noticed as I was outlining the cookies that the icing was a much different consistency than I expected. It wasn't shiny at all and was actually pretty thick. I had a difficult time squeezing it out of the icing tip (I used a #2 Wilton tip).You can probably tell by my not-so-pretty outlines! :)

After the outlines were completed and dried, it was time to flood the icing and fill in the cookies! The only problem was I had all of the icing for both colors in the bags. Since I didn't want to go through the mess of scooping it out of the bags, mixing some water in and putting it back into the bags, I decided I'd just use this as an opportunity to try out some of my icing tips! I used a small star tip to make the centers of the flowers a little more textured and used a #3 tip to swirl and fill in the petals.

With Royal Icing you have to give it plenty of time to dry before trying to stack the cookies or wrap them. I allowed them to stay out all night and dry. By the morning they were ready to be packed up! I was pretty happy with the end result as far as flavor and consistency were concerned. However, I will try to be sure to not put all of the frosting in the icing bags next time so I can actually use the flooding technique and end up with a much more uniform batch of cookies!