What's more classic than a nice sugar cookie? What's cuter than a nicely decorated sugar cookie? I'm not sure but I wanted to find out. My lovely friends know just what to get this avid home baker for her birthday. A few months ago I got my hands on a belated birthday gift from my amazing friend L.A. Maltz. I love kitschy kitchen gadgets so the Fred line has always been my thing. I was so happy to unwrap my present to find these:

Just a plethora of typography! So many styles. So chic. So clearly in need of detailed decorating. Making iced sugar cookies was a must! First I checked through my recipe files and pulled out an old favorite. But then just for fun I checked some of my favorite foodie sites: thekitchn.com, seriouseats.com, and chow.com. I found a tasty looking recipe on kitchn. What makes it so special? The addition of lemon zest and cream cheese. I was sure these light flavors would give a lil' pizzazz to the average sugar cookie.








I was lazy AND cheap on my Easter Sunday deadline so I just thinned out a tub of frosting w/ some milk from the store and added some food coloring. I put the icing into sandwich bags and snipped the tips for "mini-pipping bags." Then a pulled out some colored sugars and got to work.




While the cookies tasted great I wasn't that excited about the finished product aesthetically. I thought the icing could have been neater. As I thought about it... I came to the conclusion that it's because I was using the wrong type of frosting. I should have used what real decorators use: royal icing! So thus began a search for a good royal icing recipe. Most royal icing calls for eggs whites/meringue and/or cream of tartar. Have I ever talked about how much I hate whipping egg whites to any sort of peak? I do. So I compromised and bought some royal icing mix from the confectionery shoppe. I realize it's probably a huge bag of confectioner's sugar with a smattering of dried egg whites mixed in but I also sometimes buy pre-chopped veggies. So... go figure!

For round 2 of the classic cute sugar cookie battle I used a simple scalloped square cookie cutter. I planned on decorating the cookies with a tie-dye icing technique. I read up on using royal icing b/c it dries out so quickly so using those tips I got all the icing together and ready first. I had 1 bag of thicker royal icing for creating the borders. I also had 2 small squeeze bottles with thinner icing: 1.) white and 2.) purple.









In short.... I used the thicker royal icing to create an outline border. Then I flooded the cookie with the white (thinner) royal icing to create the background color. This flooding icing is super thin so although you don't have to use a border it makes things a bit neater in the end. Finally, I pipped some lines of the purple across the cookie and used a toothpick to drag lines across in a perpendicular direction to create the tie-dye/webbing look. I boxed these bad boys up and sent them in the mail to a few friends. Reports say thumbs up!