Cookies are good. Icing is good. And according to baker Christy Augustin, that is important to remember when you try to decorate cookies.
“Just forgive yourself. It’s going to taste great even if it doesn’t look good. It just takes practice,” she said.
Augustin is co-owner of Pint Size Bakery &Coffee in St. Louis. The bakery is in the process of making hundreds of decorated cookies for this holiday season, but Augustin said the process is easy enough that most home cooks can do it themselves.
Begin with a sturdy cookie, one that is easy to work with. At Pint Size, that is often a gingerbread or a sugar cookie. They roll the dough out about ¼-inch thick and use a cookie cutter for specific shapes.
To make an easy Christmas tree or Santa hat, you can simply cut out a circle about 6 inches in diameter. At the bakery they use a round cookie cutter, but you can use anything from an upside-down bowl to a coffee can, she said. Next, slice the circular dough into 6 or 8 equal-size wedges and bake them at 375 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes, depending on their size.
For the decorations, she uses royal icing, a mixture of powdered sugar, cream of tartar and egg whites — if you don’t have the egg whites, you can buy meringue powder and mix it with water, she said. Color the icing with food coloring or, preferably, food coloring gel. She uses green for Christmas trees and red for Santa hats.
“It’s really important to keep the icing from drying out. So we (cover it with) a damp paper towel. It will keep it from getting crusty on top,” Augustin said.
Most professional bakers prefer to pipe an outline of icing on the edges of their cookies and then fill the space in between, she said, but she prefers the method explained by cookbook author Julia M. Usher. She just spreads the icing on top of the cookie with the back of a spoon. Then she allows the icing to dry uncovered at room temperature for a day, which makes the cookies easier to handle and avoids any unfortunate instances of poking your finger into the wet icing.
Next comes the piping. For a Christmas tree, she zig-zags a line of light green icing down the cookie, to represent the branches, and carefully places sugar pearls at strategic spots to suggest ornaments. For Santa’s hats, she pipes white frosting across the bottom to look like white fur and adds a dot of white on top to represent a fluffy puffball. A sprinkling of nonpareils over the white parts adds sparkle.
What is the seemingly universal appeal of cookies during the holidays?
“A lot of people give cookies as gifts. It’s easy,” Hoormann said. “And at the holidays, you give yourself a little slack so you can have that cookie.”
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