A few weekends ago, my husband's aunt and uncle invited us to stay with them at their vacation home. Awesome, right? I thought it would be nice to bring some vacation-themed munchies to thank them for their hospitality.
I had seen a Hawaiian shirt tutorial on The Sweet Adventures of Sugar Belle that was a great source of inspiration. Honestly, this might be one of my favorite sugar cookie tutorials ever. The hibiscus flower design looks really intricate and complicated, right? However, the flowers are created using an unbelievably simple wet-on-wet technique. What's "wet-on-wet" decorating? Well, it's basically when you create a design with two or more colors of wet flood icing. Using toothpicks, you manipulate the icing into a design while it's still wet. What could be better than that? It's one of my preferred techniques because of its efficiency and ease. The more detail you're able to incorporate with flood icing, the less detail you need to add later with piping icing. Major time saver.
As you may have noticed from the post title, this is my fifth batch of sugar cookies. My cookie decorating skills still have tons of room for improvement at this point, but I'm starting to feel more comfortable with each batch I make. Trial and error really is a great process. Here is what I learned with this batch:
Lesson 1: Consistency matters for flood icing, too
From my prior batches, I knew that having too-thin piping icing would cause problems. Thin piping icing doesn't keep its shape. It turns out that that same is true for flood icing, as well, especially when using the wet-on-wet technique. If the flood icing is too thin, as was the case with my orange icing, the design is more likely to warp. Thin flood icing develops a mind of its own! The design will keep moving and shifting on the cookie even after you have stopped manipulating it. The green flood icing was a bit thicker. As a result, the hibiscus flowers on the green shirt look much better than those on the orange shirt.
Lesson 2: Experiment with different royal icing recipes
If you google "Royal Icing Recipe," you'll turn up a lot of hits. Every royal icing recipe involves powdered sugar, water, and meringue powder (or egg whites, for the brave). Royal icing may also include a drop of extract and/or a little corn syrup. That's it. The ingredient list is, more or less, always the same. However, the different recipes can yield very different types of icing. I tried a new royal icing recipe for this batch of cookies, and I may have found a keeper. I'm not sure if it was the recipe, or if I'm just getting better at making icing. In any case, I didn't have any of the problems with air bubbles that I've had in previous batches. That's a huge improvement! See? No air bubbles!
Lesson 3: Experiment with flooding vs. outlining only
When I made the orange and yellow shirts, I flooded the body of the shirt. The following day, after the body of the shirt had dried, I piped and flooded the collars and pockets on the orange and yellow shirts. On the green shirt, I just piped a collar and pocket without filling in either. The orange and yellow shirts required more work and extra drying time. However, I actually liked the look of the green shirts better.
Thanks for reading, folks!
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