Beach Themed Sugar Cookies – Sugar Cookie Recipe II

For my friend’s beach party wedding I made decorated sugar cookies for her cookie table. I wanted to use her wedding colors of blue and yellow, so all of the cookies were made from those colors and white. I used a different sugar cookie recipe than for my other friend’s cookie table at her wedding in this post (Flour’s sugar cookie recipe). I found that the Flour recipe spread more and my shapes wouldn’t hold as well. This recipe worked great for detailed cookie cutters!

I got the sugar cookie recipe from Simplyrecipes.com. These taste great and hold their shape. I’ve used this recipe before and I’ll probably keep using this one. The royal icing (flood icing) recipe I got from Sweetopia.net. The bottom of that link has the recipe and that page has the tutorial on how to get the icing to flood icing consistency. This is the best tutorial I’ve seen on cookie decorating with royal icing. Plus it’s great royal icing, I got the perfect consistency and was very happy with it. I wish I knew this for the other sugar cookies I made. Live and learn…

Rolled Sugar Cookies

From SimplyRecipes.com

Yield: About 2-3 dozen

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
2 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar

Directions

In bowl of stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar together for 1 minute. Add egg, vanilla and almond extract, beat until incorporated. Slowly add dry ingredients to wet mixture and combine until mixed.
Divide dough in half, form 2 balls. Wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.
Using a rolling pin, roll out dough (about 1/2 of one dough ball at a time) on a lightly floured surface to about 1/8″ thickness. Dip cookie cutters into flour; cut out shapes. Place cookies on silpat lined or lightly greased cookie sheets.
Bake at 375°F for 7-8 minutes.

Royal Icing

From sweetopia.net

Yield: Enough for 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients

6 oz (3/4 cup) of warm water
5 Tablespoons Meringue Powder
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
2.25 lbs powdered icing sugar

Directions

In mixer bowl, pour in the warm water and the meringue powder. Mix it with a whisk by hand until it is frothy and thickened…about 30 seconds.
Add the cream of tartar and mix for 30 seconds more.
Pour in all the icing sugar at once and place the bowl on the mixer.
Using the paddle attachment on the LOWEST speed, mix slowly for a full 10 minutes. Icing will get thick and creamy.
Cover the bowl with a dampened tea-towel to prevent crusting and drying.
Tint with food coloring or thin the icing with small amounts of warm water to reach the desired consistency.

For the sugar cookies, the batter looks so good you’ll want to eat it! After the sugar butter mixture is nice and fluffy like below, add the egg and other wet ingredients.

Then add the dry and the dough will look like below.

Then wrap it up nicely in saran wrap and refrigerate. I like making the dough the night before so it can properly chill.

I doubled the recipe, so I had a lot of dough. I like to split the dough into amounts I can roll out at once, so not all the dough comes to room temperature. It’s too hard to cut with cookie cutters when it’s soft!

Lay out on the silpat or parchment paper.

Then after they bake, let them cool completely before icing.

Look at all of my cookies, my cookies!!!! Then make the frosting as they bake or cool.

I had fun getting the right colors.

And be organized when decorating, it’s very helpful. I put out a cup for each color and had my piping tips ready. You really have to watch Sweetopia’s tutorials, they were so helpful.

I used two different piping tips, #2 for piping the outline and and #3 for flooding the cookie. I used the same piping bags and icing, but switched out the tip. I did this by putting the white insert on the inside piping bag like normal, but I put the metal tip on the outside of the bag over the bag and screwed the plastic ring on top. This way you can just switch the tips without making a new bag with the same icing. Easy!

Okay, here’s a quick – how I made the seashell decoration tutorial. Start by outlining the cookie like normal. Then flood it with the filler icing color. While it’s still wet, pipe stripes of the desired color in an arc shape.