Wedding Success and...Jams!

First, my sister's wedding. More precisely, her wedding cookies! At times while icing the cookies, I felt as though I was in a horrible dream; that the cookies were endless, and I would be painstakingly smoothing icing into the scalloped edges of outlined cookies for eternity. Thankfully, after three straight nights of icing until the wee hours of the morning, all the cookies -- outlined, flooded, and lettered -- were drying on various surfaces in the dining room.

After that point, my greatest fear was that my beloved dog would sneak into the dining room and gobble up the finished products. However, no doubt picking up on her risk of great bodily injury should she so much as shed on one cookie, she gave them a wide berth. The closed doors also helped.

Two batches of mini cream scones the morning after the wedding marked the end of my baking for a week or so, but then I was right back in my apron. :)

I returned home from an unbelievably idyllic week in British Columbia with twenty pounds of peaches and ten pounds of apples. "You are crazy...and that is totally illegal," remarked my friend, Maggie. Turns out it is actually perfectly legal to bring in fruits to the United States, as long as one can prove the fruits were grown in the Okanagan Valley (or, I presume, another region in Canada). My fellow passengers were eyeing my fragrant box of peaches covetously as we boarded the plane; I said I would share, but only if we got stuck waiting on the tarmac for hours, which we thankfully did not.

Then commenced my canning binge.

Summer fruit jam, peach butter, peach sauce, and spiced apples...the jars were intended as Christmas gifts, but I am tempted to hoard them for myself! I will only keep the spiced apples, though, to make apple pies and tarts around Christmas time. The most destructive -- I managed to crack the grating blade -- but definitely the most conducive to future baking projects! There was a good amount left over after I had filled four pint jars for processing, so I rolled out a round of pie dough and made "pocket pies," each containing only a packed tablespoon of the filling.

The canning binge is ongoing; though all the Okanagan fruit is now preserved in jars for future enjoyment, I am sure I will find some tasty inspiration at at least one of the various farmers' markets this week.

Sugar Cookies, Final Version

Success!

After baking my "Goldilocks" version of the Sprinklebakes/Williams-Sonoma cookie recipes, I was reasonably happy with the cookies. They were softer, but still flat enough to be aesthetically pleasing; a happy medium. However, the very next day I tried a recipe given to me by one of my sister's friends; it has been in her family for years now, and my sister loves it. It was fantastic! Flat, light, chewy, delicious. I found a winner.

Now, for the icing. I creamed together a batch of the same friend's buttercream frosting; it tasted heavenly, but was still not entirely dry five days later. I do not think it would withstand being stacked and otherwise packaged, especially not if each cookie was fully flooded with icing. So, since my sister liked the royal icing, I will stick with that. It dries shiny and hard, looks beautiful, and tastes good to boot. Furthermore, it is naturally white due to the absence of butter -- the butter in the buttercream turned it a soft yellow -- so should be a better backdrop for food coloring.

I will, however, plan to use the buttercream frosting for my sister's bridal shower cupcakes!

My remaining task is to figure out the best way to ice the cookies and somehow write my sister's and her fiancee's names on them. My "Message in a Cookie Cutter" cutters are wonderful, but once I ice the cookie, the lettering disappears (covered by the icing). So I believe I have two options: (1) use the stamp over the icing when it is nearly dry, so the stamp goes directly into the icing; or (2) write their names on the cookie in a color different from the background. E.g. I believe the wedding colors are yellow and navy blue, so I could do a yellow background and navy blue lettering, and/or vice versa. Maybe each guest could have one of each. The tricky part with this option is that it will likely be much more time-consuming, and I will have to bake and ice plenty of extra cookies in case I mess up the lettering! A small price to pay for perfection....

Sugar Cookies, Version 2.0

I tried the Sprinkle Bakes sugar cookie recipe (functional link in the previous post). It definitely made tastier cookies than the Williams-Sonoma recipe. However, due to the two additional eggs and two teaspoons of baking powder, they became very...let's say...round, during the baking process! For the most part, they were flat enough to look good iced, but not to be left unadorned. When they puffed up in the oven, the lettering in the cookie dough became too indistinct -- still legible, though not very snazzy-looking.

I had anticipated this problem, but wanted to give the recipe a try as-is first, just to have a baseline for comparison. For my next batch, I will use the basic W-S recipe, but add one extra egg and only one teaspoon of baking powder. This will fall right between the W-S and SB recipes. My hope is that, like Goldilocks, this recipe will be just right -- "fluffy" enough to taste delicious, and firm enough to hold its shape.

Wish me luck!

Sugar Cookies

I am on a search to find an excellent sugar cookie recipe. I have used the "America's Test Kitchen" version before, but did not really like it because it uses a few too many specialized ingredients. Calling for super fine baker's sugar, cream cheese, etc...the cookies were good, but in my mind not good enough to justify the number of ingredients.

Yesterday, I tried out the dough recipe sent with my amazing Williams-Sonoma cookie cutters. The cookies held their shape well, but they were a bit tough. Decent, but far from spectacular -- though the cookie cutters themselves are absolutely wonderful. My next venture will be to try Sprinkle Bakes' sugar cookie recipe. I have much higher hopes for this one; essentially the same as the Williams-Sonoma recipe, but with two more eggs, a touch more vanilla extract, and the addition of some baking powder.

Then, it will be on to perfecting the icing. I still have not decided between using royal icing and buttercream icing. I will have to do a few test rounds to see whether the buttercream will dry hard enough, as the cookies are intended to be part of my sister's wedding favors in July, and will thus need to be bagged together. The royal icing is good because it dries to a hard, shiny, unsmudgeable finish, but it might be a bit too sweet.

Back to the kitchen....