A Work of Heart
Hey there, cool Cats and Kittens! Today we talk about my favorite treats to make-SUGAR COOKIES! Yup! Sugar cookies! If you don't know what sugar cookies are, they are either soft or hard, almost shortbread like, cookies usually made with flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. These cookies can be frosted with either soft or hard icing, but at Rolling In Dough, we use Royal Icing, which dries hard, and does not contain any raw egg whites.
I started off practicing my decorating with cookies! I would play with every cutter, recipe, and technique I could find. My favorite part was, oddly, calligraphy on sugar cookies. A long, long time ago, my mom used to make be write with icing on the back of a cookie sheet for one hour every day during the summer.
These treats are the cutest desserts, and are perfect for gift giving in the holidays because of their long shelf life compared to other bakery treats. The right choice of colors and design can be used to really tie a dessert table together, which also makes them great as guest favors for your event! You can even find them across the internet shipped and available for purchase.
Decorating sugar cookies, even if it just a dozen, can take 4 - 12 hours, depending on technique, layering, icing consistency, number of colors, number of cookie variation. Each color must be individually mixed, layered on, and dried separately. This is necessary to prevent colors from bleeding together. Oh, yes! Moisture content and drying speed also a factor. Drying too fast will cause the icing to shrivel and wrinkle. All these factors can affect your cookie price when you inquire about them. Sugar cookies can take hours of baking and decorating time, as much or maybe more time than making a 4-tier wedding cake! Not to mention the carpal tunnel it gives your bakers, another overlooked occupational hazard.
Many bakeries do not offer sugar cookies because in order to make a profit, all of the time and effort must be accounted for in the sale. This can be very intimidating to prospective customers, because the cost does not match what they are used to seeing in a grocery store, essentially a different product. Like what the title says, it is a work of heart.
Photo: Kristen Marie Photography
