“Rolled Sugar Cookie Cutouts Recipe” and “Perfect Royal Icing” by Stella Parks with a Spooky Twist
How hard can it be: Cookies - Straightforward, Royal Icing - Kinda tricky
Overall Flavor Rating: 3.5/5
Recipe: Cookies, Royal Icing
What went well:
The cookies held their shape wonderfully and ended up looking very Halloween-ish.
The cookie flavor is quite nice for a sugar cookie (which I’m historically not a huge fan of).
What went poorly:
The application of royal icing was an absolute disaster.
Despite an ever increasing amount of flour on the countertops, the cookies still stuck.
Coming off of the high of a very successful batch of Nutter Butters, I thought it would be a great idea to try and make some Halloween-themed sugar cookies. I don’t particularly love sugar cookies, but I wanted to use the bat-shaped cookie cutter that came with our pumpkin cutter because, apparently, I’m a child.
Making the cookies was actually really straightforward. For the most part, you just throw everything into a stand mixer and then you’re ready to cut out the cookies.
The ingredients for the cookies aren’t that bad provided that you skip the optional vanilla bean pod. The weirdest thing it calls for is coconut oil, which is fairly tame by Stella’s standards (I mean some of her other recipes call for malted milk powder, which I couldn’t find at 3 different grocery stores).
To start you mix everything besides the egg and flour.
Then you need to “moisten” the ingredients on low. I’m never really sure when things are appropriately “moistened” so I just kinda mix on low for a minute or two and call it a day.
Once it’s moistened, you cream everything together on a higher speed.
Then once everything is appropriately creamed you throw in an egg. You’re lucky that these are gifs, because the close-up sound of the egg slapping around is disgusting.
And then finally you add flour a bit at a time until you have a stew dough going. Here I used the splash guard thingy that came with our mixer. Don’t worry though, I still got flour all down the side of the mixer.
When you think everything is happy, you’re supposed to give it one more final fold with a spatula. I’m not really sure what the purpose of this is, since me folding it twice with a spatula is definitely doing less than the stand mixer, but I did it just to be complete.
Once you have a cohesive ball of dough, you’re ready to roll things out. As you can see, we put a ton of flour down. After the pie crust fiasco and the trouble with the Nutter Butters sticking, we thought for sure we had put down enough.
But of course, this was somehow not enough to prevent sticking. At this point I’m starting to think that our countertop just doesn’t flour well (I’m not exactly sure what I mean by that but it’s how I feel ok?).
The process of rolling and cutting the cookies is really easy and moves along quite quickly. The only slow down was needing to re-roll the bats a couple of times because we kept ripping their wings off while peeling them off of the counter.
As simple as the process was, we got tired of rolling the scraps out over and over again so we just stuffed the remaining dough into the molds and made some extra-fat cookies.
On the pumpkins we added the same lines that we did on our Nutter Butters since we were happy with that aesthetic and it makes them look more like pumpkins and less like apples.
The cookies don’t bake very long in the oven, but when they come out they need to rest for a bit on the pan to settle into their final form.
Our cookies seemed a bit pale when we took them out, but I absolutely hate a hard sugar cookie so I was inclined to err more on the side of underdone than horribly crunchy.
We of course had to put the fatties back in because they were not nearly done yet. We baked them for another 10, 20, or 30 minutes. I honestly have no idea. We just kept adding five minutes until things felt right.
When all of the cookies were done, we decided that we should pause this endeavor and resume tomorrow. The cookies needed to cool before we could put the icing on them and it was already 10ish.
A day goes by
The next evening, we started working on the royal icing. The recipe seemed simple enough, but that was only because we hadn’t actually read it.
The recipe suggests that you use organic powdered sugar to get an icing with a bit more depth of flavor. We followed that suggestion and, well, it made things real weird. When we first put everything in the bowl it all looked fine.
But once we started mixing it had such a weird gray color. Also, there weren’t any instructions about sifting the powdered sugar but I would definitely recommend it since you can see that we had a bunch of chunks.
Once everything has been mixed together, you have to heat the icing up to 150 degrees over a pot of simmering water. I didn’t realize that I needed to be heating water until the recipe said “set over a gently simmering water bath”. Needless to say, this caused a bit of a slow down.
The actual heating of the icing also took a bit longer than the recipe suggested, and when I say a bit longer, I mean a lot longer. Maybe we weren’t getting enough contact between the water bath and our bowl? Maybe we weren’t simmering the water at the right amount of simmer? I don’t know. But this step took a long time.
But! Heating the icing up turned it into a much smoother product, though we did need to stir it constantly to prevent any kind of burning (and even then, the stuff around the edge of the bowl got really, really crusty). And to be clear, I said that you “need” to stir it constantly, but that’s not an instruction in the recipe. It just seemed like something I should be doing.
Once the icing was up to temp we dumped in an additional bit of powdered sugar and mixed again to combine.
The icing was way too thick to use on cookies at this point so we had to add in cream to thin it out (this is in the recipe, we weren’t completely free styling). As you can see below, the icing was just a big ball of frosting pre-cream.
Once we had a reasonable texture, we poured the icing into a bowl to color it. We originally split the icing into two different bowls because we had grand plans involving elaborate frosting designs.
For our first color, we were going with something dark to use on the bats.
Once we had achieved a reasonable looking color (which took a LOT of drops of gel food coloring) we put it into our crappy piping bag (aka plastic sandwich bag).
Pretty much as soon as I started squeezing the bag, the icing shot out the top and got all over my hand. I definitely should have twisted the top closed to seal it up.
I tried to power through it and keep going but I was making an ungodly mess.
I traded the piping bag off and tried to let a more skilled hand give it a shot. But, despite our best efforts, the entire icing plan was quickly abandoned. We settled on putting a small face on each thing and calling it a day. The bat that looks like it was punched in the face is my best attempt at doing a smiley face.
Once I had washed all of the icing off of my hands and let the icing on the cookies solidify a bit, I am amazed to say that they actually didn’t look like complete garbage!
And amazingly, they taste pretty good to boot! Well as good as a simple sugar cookie is going to taste. But I think they were actually enjoyable because I took them to work the next day and every single one of them was eaten.
So would I recommend this? I will definitely recommend the cookies. The icing, ehhhhhh, I dunno about the icing. It was a lot of hassle for royal icing and I don’t know that its flavor was that much better than something simpler. That being said, we’re dumb enough that we’ll probably try this again at Christmas.