Lesson learned: If you’re going to spend a Sunday rolling, cutting and transferring dozens of snowflake cookies to baking sheets, do it over the high countertops, not the low breakfast table. Your back will thank you.
This year’s holiday gift-baking spree gave me a good appreciation for how much patience and attention to detail it must take to be a cake decorator, pastry chef or other dessert artist.
I thought the hard part was over when all eight dozen cookies had been rolled, baked and cooled. Then I mixed up a three-cup batch of royal icing and learned just how much more difficult things could get.
I linked the chocolate recipe in this post. I was really happy with this recipe. It produced a dough that was easy to work with and cookies that baked up with a rich chocolate taste. I did forget to add the cinnamon, which probably would have added a nice touch, but they were good nonetheless.
As for the plain sugar, I chose this recipe from Epicurious, despite the fact that several reviewers called it the worst sugar cookie recipe EVER. I added about a tablespoon of lemon zest to this recipe to try to avoid the bland results others had experienced, and I thought mine came out pretty well.
The key to everything was keeping the dough cold, and I developed a pretty intricate system of transferring sheets of dough from rolling board to fridge to cutting board to cookie sheet.
Once the cookies were done, I used a recipe out of a magazine to make the royal icing. I used the “Just Whites” powdered egg whites for this. They smelled disgustingly sulfuric, but once I whipped them up with enough powdered sugar, the icing turned out pretty yummy. This was yet another lesson that the icing we love to shovel into our mouths as kids is truly nothing but sugar and, in some cases, butter, egg yolks or cream cheese.
This stuff is beautiful, though. Shiny and white, it would make a beautiful coating for a soft, moist cake, and would probably help keep the cake fresh underneath.
Trouble was, my homemade icing tools (actually, just a Ziploc bag with a teeny bit of corner snipped off) weren’t quite up to the job. Several of the snowflakes I decorated looked like someone had sneezed on them and blown royal icing instead of snot. I spread the globs around and made them into fully-iced cookies. I was a little disappointed, but they didn’t look half bad after they dried.
But icing cookies is a lot of work! So I iced a couple dozen, and then divided those up among the six gift boxes I put together. I made sure to lay them carefully on top.
I never did make the cheese straw recipe I found in Southern Living, in part because my mother sent us some Moravian cheese straws that I knew I couldn’t compete with. But mainly because time ran out on me.
Maybe next year I’ll make it a savory baking frenzy.
