Christmas Cookies and Holiday Post-Mortem

Ok, it has been quite awhile since I posted.  Part of that was my enthusiasm for this new craft phase of mine.  I planned TONS of new projects and I executed only a few of them.  So my lessons learned from this holiday period:

1) Start early.  REALLY early.  I'm thinking I'm going to have to plan many of my holiday projects around Halloween and start no later than Thanksgiving weekend.  I got many things done, however I definitely felt rushed at the end and didn't put the effort into packaging that I had planned.

2) Budget!  I think I blew my entire Christmas budget and didn't buy a single gift.  Oops.  It was all for a good cause!

So here is a project that didn't go off as planned:

Recipes: Heather Chittum's Sugar Cookies via The Washington Post
                 Royal Icing Recipe via Sweetopia

So the plan was to bake ice and wrap sugar cookies for gifts this holiday season.  I had these wonderful visions of creating different colors of icing and getting comfortable with using a pastry bag.  Well, that almost happened.

The cookies:

I followed the recipe exactly.  I sifted the flour with the other dry ingredients (minus the sugar).  It was a little weird not letting the butter go to room temperature, but I guess made sense.  Next time I may let the butter soften since it's so much easier to use that way and it's going in the fridge anyway.  

Finished product!

After

Before

 So something I noted, I put the dough in the fridge/freezer constantly.  Sometimes while I was cutting the shapes I had to chill the dough.  I would definitely be more conscious in the future of that.

Done!

The Icing:

The next step was the icing which I did the next day.   I purchased a Wilton tool caddy that seemed to be a good starting place for using a pastry bag and piping tools.   So I followed the icing directions, no pictures because I do think the icing issues I had was a matter of viscosity.   According to the detailed directions on Sweetopia's site, there seem to be two types of people in the world.  People who like to outline their cookies and flood them with icing with the same viscosity and people who like a thicker icing for the cookies.  I realized that I am in the latter category.   Also, the directions said to use a #2 or #3 tip.  I started with a #2 tip, but when I used the runny icing, the icing was so thin that I realized I needed a thicker tip for the outline to compensate.  In the end decorating the cookies was a complete mess (see above) because I had no handle on the viscosity issues.  So a future post will be fully dedicated to icing cookies.  I plan on practicing for all minor holidays so I can be ready for next year around the holidays.  Also, I couldn't find a photo, but not only did the icing did start to bleed but my kitchen and my hands were pink from the food coloring.  My next attempt will involve rubber gloves!