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RECIPE: Easter Cookies with Royal Icing

Easter Cookies with Royal Icing

Easter is coming up and we thought it was about time we got busy in the kitchen and tried our hand at something new. I had been on Pinterest and   Instagram and seen picture after picture of beautiful Easter baking and among all these beautiful photos, have been many of Easter cookies with royal icing. So I decided to make some Easter cookies with royal icing.

Sunday was a very wet and rainy day around here and I had a friend and her daughter visiting from out of town so we decided to make these while we visited and drank tea.

I have a great sugar cookie recipe by Sweet Sugarbelle that has a very nice flavour so that was our starting point.

Basic Sugar Cookie Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 c. {two sticks} of REAL unsalted BUTTER, softened
• 1 1/2 c. confectioner’s sugar
• 1 egg
• 2-3 tsp almond flavouring almond
• 2 1/2-2 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt

Instructions

Cream together the butter with the icing sugar.

Add the egg and almond extract then beat until incorporated.

In a separate bowl mix together the dry ingredients then add slowly to the butter mixture. Mix all in until most of the dough sticks to the paddle but it should not stick to your fingers.

Now it’s time to roll out the dough. You want it to be about ¼” thick.

As my friend and I were rolling out the dough her daughter pipes up from the couch that if we use a chopstick alongside the dough and roll on top of the chopsticks then the dough will be exactly the same thickness. Um… what? Where did she learn that?? Apparently, if you take Foods at school you get a whole bunch of little tricks from the teacher. So we tried it and it worked!!

Continuing on we used our dollar store Easter egg cookie cutter to make our egg shapes.

Then it was time to put them on the parchment paper lined cookie sheet and bake for about 8 mins. But that will depend on how your oven interprets 350 degrees. Watch closely!

While the cookies were cooling we were on to the royal icing. We were actually feeling pretty smug at this point. We didn’t burn the cookies and they tasted mighty fine. I had looked up royal icing online so was feeling pretty confident about making “piping” icing and “flooding” icing. I had learned that you are supposed to outline the cookie first with the piping icing then you can thin it down just a bit so you can “flood” the cookie on the inside of that outline.

Here is the Royal Icing recipe we used.

• Royal Icing
• 3 cups icing sugar
• 2 egg whites
• ¼ t cream of tartar
• 1 t vanilla
• water as needed

We did not have a problem getting the right consistency of the icing BUT we had real issues once we started to add the colour. I had bought some “special” food colouring from a kitchen store recently and thought it would be the prime time to try them out. That didn’t work out so well. The fact is, the colours were so saturated they didn’t look like Easter at all! We are talking fuchsia instead of a light pastel pink we were after.   Moral of the story? The inexpensive food colouring you get at the grocery store is just fine and can make lovely pastel colours!!

Once we did get the colours more sorted out, we started outlining with the piping icing.

The flood icing is supposed to “melt” together- it just kind of runs together to make an even layer. If the icing is a bit too thick you can help it along by using a toothpick to smooth it out.

This is where our girls really pitched in and we had loads of laughs and fun.
We had all four of us huddled over our layer of cookies “ooing” and “ahing” at our “good” ones and giggling at our not so good ones.

I will say this wasn’t the easiest baking I’ve ever done. The icing decorating was quite labour intensive BUT I will also say my friend and I had SUCH a good time doing this together and with our girls. Even though our girls are pretty much grown, it was so nice to spend this time in the kitchen with them and share food, tea and some laughs.

Happy Baking!!!

If you have some baking adventures you’d like to share or even some great tips, drop us a line! We’d love to pass it on!