Ghosts of Cookies Past

This is how it all started.

I'd never made a Christmas cookie - or really even contemplated it - until this past December, when I decided my life wouldn't be complete until I had decorated some festive holiday treats. Not being of the Christmas-celebrating persuasion, I opted for snowmen and snowflakes over ornaments and trees. With my mom along for moral support, I took a little field trip to the NY Cake store on 22nd Street and found an excellent collection of cookie cutters. After choosing 5 or 6 shapes I couldn't live without, and stopping for some sanding sugar and pretty, pretty silver dragees (pretty!), I went home and began researching.

To whom does a novice cookie-baker-slash-decorator turn when she wants a good, standard rolled sugar cookie (and royal icing) recipe? To Martha Stewart, of course! And Martha did not disappoint. The dough was simple to make, and the cookies were tasty - and more important - a great canvas for my art.

If you look at royal icing recipes and guidelines, most of them tell you things like "mix until icing is the consistency of glue" or "add sugar until icing is proper consistency." These directions are utterly unhelpful (what kind of glue? what does proper mean?!), and I discovered that the ideal royal icing is generally the result of good, old-fashioned trial and error.  In other words, I can't tell you how to make perfect royal icing, but I know it when I see it!

So... it turns out that decorated sugar cookies are a huge undertaking. You have to make the dough, chill it to firm, roll it out, cut the cookies, bake them, and let them cool completely. Then decorating takes another full day. But, it's worth it when they turn out to be so cute.

My cookies made me so happy that I almost couldn't bear to part from them (much less let people eat them)! Luckily, I had just gotten a new camera, and was looking for excuses to practice using it. And practice I did.