Monday, December 25, 2017

Happy Holidays!

Part two of the Holiday Series will show the process of making the icing for those Christmas cookies.

As you saw in part one, we decided to make regular cookie shapes out of the nutmeg dough, which was normally turned into log shapes.  Since it tended to keep it shape much better than the gingerbread version, we gave it a try.

Sugar and butter whipped together with vigor and a fork created the base.  Into this mix would go the food coloring.

We set up some containers for the mixing process.  Amazingly enough, we are still using the containers of food coloring which we used on our wedding cake frosting 16 years ago!

Depending on how much of the coloring you place in the mix, you will get a more or less intense result.  I went pretty heavy with this forest green, since we had a lot of Christmas tree shapes!

Since we felt like there was a little more time this year, and there were two of us, a few new colors were added.  The Cyan blue and the forest green were added, and we would be surprised at how many fun options that would provide.

We also set up more of an assembly line.  It's not just for miniatures!

As we had in the past, we used baggies with a small hole cut in one side.

Cathy would do a bunch of cookies with one color, leaving space for me to place a color that I might have in my hand, such as the lighter green or yellow.

The forest green provided an unexpected bonus... we could make Christmas Goblins!

It can take a little while to get used to painting with a baggy of frosting, but it does work.  Having lots of little candy pieces and flakey bits was very helpful.  I tend to use those a little more each year.

Sometimes as you are plowing through all those cookies, you forget about those little stars and tiny candies.

The D20 shape was not easy to do, but with the frosting warmed up from lots of handling, it "thinned" it down like a glaze on a series 7 brush.

Having multiples of the same shapes meant that you could try out more color combos.  I also like to cover more of the cookie, instead of just doing outlines.

Here's another peek at the growing stack!  I will try to post as many pictures as I can, although they were kinda packed away before we took pictures of the overall batches on the sheets.

Lots of happy Holiday cheer!  These should keep Santa happy...