No Fail Sugar Cookies (NFSC): Completed

No Fail Sugar Cookies (NFSC)
Trial Run

(+5 skill points -> 215/400)

This will be the only time I'll give myself points for sugar cookies, cuz hey!  This is a cake blog :b  Here are the No Fail Sugar Cookies (NFSC).  This recipe was from cakecentral.com (recipe here).  I can only assume the name is from the success rate for making these cookies.  Several people on cakecentral use this recipe ... it's super popular.  Taste-wise, it didn't exactly blow my mind.  They were basically regular sugar cookies, and I probably wouldn't be able to pick it out from several other recipes.

Stats:

• NFSC 
• flooded royal icing
• colored piping gel decorations

It's been a while since I've decorated sugar cookies.  Last time was a couple years ago with those big tubes of Wilton colored decorator's icing that taste awful.  These came out a'ight.

Cookie recipe was pretty basic.

I let the dough chill in the fridge for a couple hours.  When I took it out, it was pretty hard.  I sliced it with a large knife and worked with a little at a time.

Rolling the dough on to a flour covered cutting board was a easy-peasy.  I broke out some old and new Christmas cookie cutters.

The scrap dough was easy to re-work with for rolling out more.  It took a little over 15 minutes for them to bake.

 

 
This was my first attempt at using the flooding technique.  Here's a good tutorial on that from sweetopia.net.  I made some royal icing with my left over All Whites (pasteurized egg whites) carton.  The cookies were piped with tip #4.  After piping all of the cookies I thinned the icing down with water as per the "10 second rule".  Flooding the cookies was enjoyable ... almost therapeutic ... I used a wet paintbrush to help fill in any gaps.

On my last cake, I used the Wilton black piping gel and it looked great.  I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday and bought almost every color they had.

Unfortunately the other colors weren't as bold as the black.  Most were very clear looking.  Oh well, there'll be a time and place for those to come in handy.  For now, I'll have to stick to coloring royal icing if I want it to look right.

Afterward I still had a lot of royal icing left over ... so I just piped a bunch of stuff on to wax paper.

 

The little blogs are kinda neat ... perfect royal icing buttons.  I'll pop them off later and see what they're like.

FAILS:

• the outlining is very noticeable ... I'm not sure if I need to flood it more or use a smaller tip ... probably need to use #2
  
• Wilton decorating gel: only awesome in black
• too lazy to color royal icing

FTWs:

• flooding technique badge earned
• tastes ok (but could be better)
• now I have a bunch of buttons I can use ... for something ...
• royal icing made with pasteurized egg whites was just fine ... cheaper than using meringue powder