Sunday, July 11, 2010

World Cup Cookies

Hello again! I feel a bit bad because it's been a while since I posted anything. My original intention was to write about carrot muffins in my next post, but two recipes later I'm still not satisfied with the result. I have a couple more recipes to try though, so it is forthcoming. I'd rather not write anything at all than give you a dodgy recipe. Really I thought that getting my hands on a good carrot muffin recipe would be fairly easy. Apparently not. Oh well. I have something else for you today.

My sister and I had a party last night in celebration of the World Cup. (Well done Spain!) In honour of this celebration I made cookies decorated like soccer balls and the flags of the four quarter-final teams.





I'm going in a slightly different direction with this post. Rather than give you the recipes, I'm going to give you a bit of a decorating lesson: How to Flood Cookies! I swear my next post will be accompanied by a recipe. I already have one in mind. One that is fabulous and summery and won't have you slaving over a hot stove.

The reason I'm not giving you the recipes is that sugar cookies and royal icing are fairly standard and in no short supply. Everyone seems to have their personal preference regarding these two recipes and, in any case, they won't be hard to find should you not have a preferred recipe. Flooding cookies is fairly simple if you have a steady hand, albeit time consuming. They're certainly not something you can whip up the day of.

First, make your royal icing. (Well, actually, first make your cookies in the desired shapes and have a design in mind.) Make sure it's nice and shiny and dye it whatever colour you need it to be. Slowly add water to the icing, a tiny bit at a time (do NOT add too much, you can always add more water, you can't take it away). You want it to be just runny enough that it falls back in on itself when you drizzle it in the bowl. It still needs to have enough substance to stay where you put it and not run all over the place.

Any colours that will rest right next to each other need to be done on separate days so the colours don't run into each other. I'm using the Spanish flag as the example here. Make an outline with the icing like so (apologies for the blurriness)....



Then scribble inside as desired and move the icing around to fill in the gaps. You can use your finger to do this, or a brush, but I usually just use the tip of my piping bag, which works just fine.



The end result should look like this....



Once you have all the initial designs done (as below with the flags), let them set over night.



Repeat the process with the rest of the design. You can pipe on top of the set icing like I did with the sun on the Uruguay flag. To make the subtle lines on the white part of the soccer ball pipe them on first and let them set a bit, like so....



When you fill them in they should end up like this....



If you mess any of them up, perhaps by not leaving enough room for the fourth blue stripe in the Uruguay flag, just eat it. No one has to know!



Have Fun!

4 comments:

  1. Well done, they look great and are tasty too!

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  2. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm they look good.. also good decorating tips! Looks like you probably had a fun party. Wish I could have made it!

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  3. Neato - I didn't know you had a blog! These recipes look great; maybe I'll be adventurous and try one out one day. I'm generally a good cook as long as I can fry something, so some of these will be a nice departure from that.

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  4. I gotta say that the looked as good as they tasted!

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