Batch 3: Patriotic Fourth of July Sugar Cookies

After making flower cookies for my last two batches of sugar cookies, I was looking forward to trying a few different cookie cutters.  The Fourth of July presented the perfect opportunity.  I realize that posting these cookies in August doesn’t seem as seasonally appropriate as it would have been in July.  However, I think there’s something fun about patriotic displays any time of the year. 

When I made the bridal shower favors, I got lucky with cool weather.  Such was not the case when I made these cookies.  In fact, the temperature in our kitchen was 86-88 degrees, before I turned the oven on.  We live in a 1920s apartment without central air conditioning.  At the time, we did not have an air conditioner in our kitchen.  Have you ever tried rolling out cookie dough in an 86 degree room?  Plain and simple, it's nearly impossible even if you've chilled the dough for a few hours.  The dough might be perfectly cool and firm as you roll it out.  However, it warms and softens so quickly that no amount of flour can prevent it from sticking to the table or to the cookie cutters.  You may manage to cut a clean shape, but then the challenge becomes transferring the cut dough from the table to the cookie sheet without the shapes melting and warping beyond recognition.    

 

I’ve subsequently figured out a workable solution for rolling and cutting cookies in oppressive heat.  Once I’ve perfected my method, I’ll create a separate tutorial post.  But as I was making this set of cookies, only one thought occurred to me: if the kitchen is too hot to roll and cut sugar cookies, just use a cooler room.  Sounds simple, right?

This is how I decided to move our kitchen table into our living room at 11:00 PM on a Wednesday night, leaving a trail of powdered sugar and flour in my wake.  Our kitchen table is one of those sub-$200 Ikea numbers with drop leaves.  It weighs all of five pounds, so I didn’t think moving the table should be difficult.  But the entire incident was laughable.  My husband was immersed in some video game and wearing headphones (you know, the cool kind with the mouthpiece so the players can talk to each other?), so he was oblivious to the racket I was causing.  Even though the table is lightweight, maneuvering it into the living room was a bit of a challenge.  I already had dough, parchment paper, cookie sheets, cookie cutters, and a rolling pin on top of the table.  And, surprise -- all this stuff kept sliding off if I didn’t hold the table perfectly level.   Who would have imagined that a rolling pin would roll?  Apparently I was too lazy/impulsive/stubborn to clear the table before moving it.  Plus, the living room is about 11' x 12' and has a narrow doorway.  It already houses a couch, a coffee table, a desk, an accent table, two chairs, an entertainment center and some wilting house plants.  In other words, it’s not the kind of room that begs to have another piece of furniture moved into it.  However, the living room has a window unit air conditioner, which made it infinitely better suited to my dough-rolling needs than the kitchen would have been.  As you can probably imagine, it took more effort and patience to roll out these cookies than I had planned.    

I also had more difficulty decorating these cookies than I had in the past.  My white piping icing was a little too thin.  When I used the wet-on-wet technique (accenting a wet flooded cookie with more flood icing, in a different color), some of the colors bled together.  And, air bubbles developed on a lot of the piping.  This is a problem I’ve had with many later batches, as well, and I’m still trying to rectify this. 

See the bleeding on the white polka-dotted cookie?  This is something I'm trying to fix. 

Most of these cookies had air bubbles on the piping icing.  I've noticed that this happens most frequently on the corners.  

The white piping icing was too runny, which caused the "USA" and "1776" to lose its shape. 

By contrast, the consistency of the red piping icing used for this "USA" was just right.

Despite some mistakes, I think these cookies turned out pretty gosh-darn adorable.  The best part was seeing the big, blue icing-stained grin on my husband’s seven-year old cousin as she ate her fourth cookie.  She may love sweets almost as much as I do. 

This is what I used:

• Star cookie cutter (available here).  2.25” fluted cookie cutter (available as part of this five-piece Ateco set). 
• Two batches of sugar cookie dough
• One batch of royal icing, which made: 
• Two colors of piping icing (red and white)
• Three colors of flood icing (red, white, blue
• Assorted sprinkles

This is what I learned:

1.)    The week before Fourth of July, the local cake decorating store will run out of navy gel food coloring.  I’ll be better prepared next time.  (Wait, there’s a local cake decorating store?  And it’s walking distance from our apartment?!  This is aaaaawesome.)

2.)    Not to worry!  You can mix your own navy icing using royal blue, violet, and a touch of black. See here for proportions.  I kept mine a little lighter – more like Superman blue -- but that is simply personal preference.   

3.)    Blue icing makes your teeth really blue.  As in, Kool-Aid blue.  It’s pretty adorable when you’re seven.  It’s less adorable when you’re 27.    

4.)    If your piping icing is too watery, it will not maintain its shape once piped.   Any designs you pipe will appear flattened and may run together.  I’ve also found that white icing is more prone to this issue than tinted icing.  I think the gel coloring acts as a thickening agent. 

5.)    When using the wet-on-wet technique, saturated colors such as blue and red may bleed into lighter colors, like white.  I’m also trying to figure out if there is a way to prevent this.