I had a Halloween-themed party last weekend.  I say “Halloween-themed” because it wasn’t really a Halloween party…just a gaming party that happened to be around Halloween time.  As usual, I took the opportunity to add something new to my baking repertoire.  This time I tried something I’ve been wanting to try for awhile: royal icing and flooding cookies!

If you don’t know, royal icing is a type of icing that hardens very quickly and leaves a crisp layer on your dessert.  “Flooding” is a technique in which you “flood” a border with thinner icing that smoothly fills that border out.  I’ve actually had little squeeze bottles collecting dust in my cupboards for awhile now in preparation for this experiment.  I bought them months ago at my local Michael’s, anticipating I’d be trying out royal icing at any moment.  What took me so long wasn’t so much the icing part, but rather the cookies.

Being a lazy baker, rolled-out cookies aren’t really my favorite thing.  Sure, they taste fine enough, but ugh, SO MUCH WORK.  Make the dough, chill the dough, roll out the dough, use cookie cutters, make sure the surface is well-floured…man, even just talking about it makes me want to sit down.  I’m telling you – drop cookies are where it’s at.

But, since I’ve been waiting forever to do this and I had a party at which to share them, I sucked it up and got down to business.

I had two cookie cutters to use for Halloween: ghosts and tombstones.  That meant white and grey were the only two colors I needed to worry about.  Following Joy of Baking‘s excellent instructions, I whipped up a batch of border frosting and flooding frosting.  It’s actually pretty easy, just some egg whites, lemon juice and confectioner’s sugar.  With a slightly thicker version of the frosting I halved it, colored half grey, and outlined the cookies.

In retrospect I wish I’d had a thinner tip for the outlining; the outline is a little distracting to the overall effect from the insides, plus it just meant the outline-icing would have lasted longer.  As it was, I had about a dozen cookies left after I finished it off.  Oh well!

Next I made the flooding batch, halved it, and colored half grey.  Then I flooded them up!

This worked pretty well, though I think next time I’ll keep the flooding icing a little thinner.  It flooded the cookies just fine, but it was still a little sluggish and, as you can see above, still left a pretty noticeable line between the outline and the inside.  Even so, the process and end product were pretty much by the book.

In the end the cookies were just cookies, not particularly special-tasting, but they turned out looking pretty nice; I got several compliments, including “I thought it was weird you had store-bought cookies!”  Not bad, right? ^_^

Anyway, I might actually do this again sometime, just to get the process down a little better, but I’d have to find a better sugar cookie recipe.  Anyone with sugar cookie-expertise want to throw me a few tips?  Mine were a little crispy…maybe that means I just rolled them out too thinly?  Maybe the recipe was “meh”?  Give to me your knowledge!

Chocolate Sugar Cookies & Royal Icing

Both from Joy of Baking!