Thursday, November 19, 2009

SUGAR COOKIE TRICKS OF THE TRADE


SO far in my quest for easy, perfect AND professional looking sugar cookies I have come across several really handy tips that I wanted to share with you all.


TIPS FOR WORKING WITH THE DOUGH:

TIP 1
Work with really chilled dough! Only take out enough to work with at a time and leave the rest of the dough in the fridge.

TIP 2
Use powdered sugar instead of flour when rolling out your dough - it makes for sweater cookies.

TIP 3
Roll dough out on parchment paper, then use your cookie cutters, making sure to leave plenty of space between each cookie. Tear away the scraps and slide parchment paper directly onto your cookie sheet. Doing it this way eliminates the need to move your cut cookies which can damage their shape.


TIPS FOR ICING THE COOKIES:

TIP 1
Using thick Royal Icing pipe the outlines of your cookie. Then using a thinner Royal Icing, "flood" the cookie. Below is a video I found on YouTube that demonstrates this tip:




TIP 2
Use a squeeze bottle with your thinner Royal Icing that you will flood the cookies with.

TIP 3
Icing prep - figuring out what colors of icing you will need, how much and where it will be used on your cookie. I found all this in really great detail at Bake at 350 ( Thanks Colette for introducing me to this site!) . You can read all about her tips HERE, and find out a ton more info on the small details that make really nice looking cookies by searching through all her posts labeled "the details".



There are, I'm sure, a ton more tricks and tips that I didn't even touch on, but these six tips were the ones that I think I will find most useful when I get ready to start my sugar cookie adventure.

3 comments:

Colette said...

I've got another tip - I think the rolling out on parchment is a GREAT idea, but when I bake with my grandma, we reuse the same couple of sheets (one in the oven, one with the next batch to go in) so what I normally do is have a spatula or a pastry scraper & treat the cookies kind of like pancakes, scoop them up & deposit them on the sheet.

Can you tell I'll be stalking your baking blog LOL? I love cooking, just so long as someone else is willing to clean up!

Brooke said...

COLETTE - Good!! Your tips and ideas have been wonderful! I would do that, but all the spatula's that I have are too thick, the one thin one I had someone (cough, Ricco, cough!) used to scrable eggs with and sort of melted the tip, making it not as thin as I needed it to be. Just using it to transfer the cooked cookies was messing the bottoms of them up and little bits were collecting on the end of the spatula where the plastic has bubble from the heat of using it to fry with. Men!!! lol

Colette said...

LOL - the only cooking most men should be allowed to do is grilling =) Or the occassional boiled egg, although somehow even doing that my dad can mess up the entire kitchen!