Make your favorite cookie recipe or use store-bought cookies to create whimsical treats that look like tiny quilts. With the use of royal icing, edible ink pens, and a little planning, you can create a cookie that looks quilted regardless of whether you can sew or not. For a quilt enthusiast or as a snack for a quilting bee, adorable quilted cookies are delicious notions. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Sketch and plan your designs. Decide on the quilt patterns you will use and what colors you want before you start decorating your cookies. Make sketches and notes on a sheet of paper you can keep close by as you decorate. Quilting blocks are most commonly geometric patterns and ideas are readily available on the Internet.
Mix the royal icing to the appropriate consistency. Make your own icing using a combination of 4 cups icing sugar, 2 tbsp. meringue powder and 6 tbsp. water, or purchase the premixed dry ingredients from a bulk foods store and add water per the instructions. Blend the mixture with your hand mixer on low setting until it is a smooth consistency that is firm enough to keep its shape, but loose enough to pipe easily.
Mix the royal icing colors. Separate the royal icing into small bowls, one for each icing colors you want. Mix the royal icing well until the color is uniform. Make sure to cover the royal icing tightly with plastic wrap while you aren't using it because it dries out quickly.
Fill the disposable piping bags, fitted with #2 tips, with your colored royal icing. Only put in enough icing for your piping, leaving enough royal icing in the bowls for filling in the colors of your design. Pipe the outline of your quilting block patterns on your cookies. Use a steady hand to outline each geometric piece of your quilt pattern in the color that you will be filling it with.
Allow the icing to dry to the touch before moving on.
Thin your reserved colored royal icing by adding a few drops of water at a time while you blend it at a low speed with your mixer. You have reached the correct consistency when icing dripping from the raised beaters forms a ribbon-like swirl on the top of the icing that disappears within 10 seconds. Do not over-thin your icing.
Fill your squeeze bottle with the thinned colored royal icing.
Flood each piped section on your cookies with the appropriate colors by squeezing the icing from the bottle in a right-to-left motion, and then a top-to-bottom motion, within the piped outline. Do not completely fill the area, but add enough icing so that once it is spread, it will fill the section. Use the end of a toothpick to spread the royal icing out to completely fill the interior of the piped section. Continue in this fashion, flooding and spreading, until all the sections of your design are filled in.
Allow the royal icing to dry completely.
Draw tiny stitching details onto the dried royal icing using your edible ink pen so that the cookies look like quilted squares. Allow the details to dry before enjoying.
Tips
- Use different-colored edible ink pens to add more details to your quilted cookies or to add different-colored stitching.
Warning
- Make sure the icing has completely dried in between each decorating step to keep the colors from bleeding into each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment