Major Learning Project – Week 9

The time has finally come – my last week of cookie decorating (for this class anyways). This week I decided to try and tie everything together and create a variety of Christmas cookies with the royal icing. I knew right away that I wanted to do a candy cane and a Christmas tree. I thought it would be fun to post a poll on Twitter and see what other design I should try! It was a close race for awhile, but the gingerbread people pulled ahead! I also ended up doing a snowman since the design I found was SOOO CUTE, as well as a Christmas present.

Thank you to the 11 people who voted!

To begin, I decided to be a bit more festive and try a dough recipe that included candy canes! I went with this recipe, from the same blog that had the amazing chocolate one. I was hoping that it would be just as good, if not better. I will admit that it was not bad, but was definitely nothing special. I found the cookies to be a bit more chewy and less soft, which was a bit disappointing. I am not sure if it was the recipe, or the added candy canes. Once they were all cooked and cooled, I whipped up a batch of the Wilton royal icing with a bit of vanilla. It took about 45 minutes to mix and bag up all of the colours! I figured since I was doing some more complicated designs, I would make 2 of each colour: an outline consistency and a flood consistency. A few small issues arose during this process:

#1- I had some icing leftover from before (like green from my last big tree). When I made only one icing in order to have both consistencies, the colour was not exactly the same.
#2- I ended up with multiple different flavours (lemon, almond, and vanilla). Hopefully this wouldn’t impact the taste too much.
#3- No matter how much red I used, I could not get red icing, only pink!

Once that was all done, I began to outline and then flood all of the backgrounds of the cookies. I left that to dry for a few hours (I could have even left it for a day). Then, I began to add all of the finishing touches. I think that for the most part they turned out pretty nice. The snowmen were definitely my favourite! I got my inspiration for the cookies by simply searching “Christmas cookies decorated” and Christmas cookies with royal icing” on Pinterest.

Thank you to everyone who has been following along with this journey! I look forward to writing my final summary post next week. Stay tuned for a nice recap as well as some tips, tricks, and my favourite recipes!