Thursday, February 14, 2008

I <3 ...

Valentine's Day has to be one of my most favorite holidays (even though up until last year I was always without a Valentine), I love all of the pink and hearts, and I do believe that if you just stick a heart on anything, it will automatically be cute.

With that said, I had so much fun last night decorating cookies. One of my goals this year was to learn how to really decorate cookies and make them beautiful. I had read about "flooding" cookies with royal icing, and held out until Valentine's Day to give it a try. I used the royal icing recipe from Joy of Baking and learned the technique from What's Cooking America (also my go-to for MM Fondant). The process was just about what I had expected - piping on whatever designs I wanted, letting them dry for about 5 minutes, then "flooding" the surface with royal icing that was made to a thinner consistency and put into a squeeze bottle. I think the hardest part was getting the right consistency to make sure the icing was thin enough to really spread well, and because the outer color contrasted from the inner color I had to be careful not to let the pinks and reds flood OVER the white outline.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Valentine's Day, and I'm looking forward to spending a quiet evening at home making dinner with Steve and watching Lost, what a perfect evening :)


(I just read about the Heart for Your Valentine blog event [thanks Rah Cha Chow] so I'm going to submit...yay!)

4 comments:

zorra said...

Look great. I have no nervs to do such beautiful decoration. ;-)

Thank you for your participation and happy Valentine!

Tracy said...

Beautiful cookies! You did a great job. Glad I tipped you off! You're a great addition to the round-up. It's fun reading all of the contributions, isn't it?

Emily said...

They're lovely! This sounds like a fun event.
I see you've made some changes to your blog.
So that's what you look like! I think someday I will post a picture too.

Laura said...

Thanks all!

And yes, I'm trying to make some changes to the blog to fit in with some of the "cool" blogs I read! In truth, this whole blogging thing is new to me and I never anticipated anyone, other than like my boyfriend and mom, reading it. So now I'm trying to make some changes and get it up to par...