Batch 6: Citrus Sugar Cookies

After making the Hawaiian shirt cookies in the last post, I had quite a bit of leftover lime green, yellow, and orange icing.  I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I couldn’t bring myself to dump that much icing down the drain, either.  The excess icing had already been poured into squeeze bottles, so I just stashed them in the fridge and decided to figure out a plan later.

The next day, I had an epiphany: I had seen a tutorial by Marian on Sweetopia for citrus-themed sugar cookies.  What better way to use up a bunch of lime green, lemon yellow, and orange icing? (I’m aware that the word “epiphany” should probably be reserved for topics more serious than sugar cookies.  But it felt like an epiphany at the time, so I’m comfortable with my word usage).   Since I had so much extra orange icing, I decided I could even add a few drops of red food coloring and create blood oranges.  Cute!   

In a prior batch – specifically these flower cookies  –  I stored tinted flood icing in the fridge for use at a later time.  It’s definitely possible to use day-old, tinted flood icing.  However, the food coloring will separate from the icing when it has been stored in the fridge.  As a result, parts of the icing will be watery and parts of the icing will be thick.  The trick is to make sure the icing is thoroughly stirred after taking it out of the fridge so that the food coloring is evenly distributed and all the icing has the same consistency.  This is a little difficult if you’ve stored the icing in squeeze bottles.  It’s much easier if you’ve stored the icing in regular airtight plastic containers.    I was too lazy to transfer my icing from the squeeze bottles in order to mix it fully.  Instead, I just stuck a wooden chopstick into each bottle and swirled it around.  For the most part, this seemed to work.  However, I didn’t mix the green icing well enough, as you’ll see in the close-ups.       

Marian’s tutorial is really comprehensive, so I won’t repeat the steps here.  But be certain to hop on over to her blog if you’d like to make these citrus cookies for yourself.  They’re actually much easier to make than you might think! 



Here’s what I learned with this batch:

1). If the icing on a cookie looks wet, it probably is

I flooded these cookies sometime around midnight and expected that they would be dry in the morning.  When I woke up at 5:00 am, the blood oranges didn’t look quite dry…so I stuck my finger in them as a test.  Um, that was a dumb idea.  I confirmed my suspicions, but I ruined a cookie in the process.   This cookie then had a fingerprint so clear that it could  have been submitted to a forensics lab as evidence

2). If you are using day-old icing and it is not mixed thoroughly, it may “shrink” when it dries

On my lime cookies, the flood icing pulled away from the piping icing.  The only explanation I have for the shrinkage is that the green flood icing wasn’t as thoroughly mixed as the other colors had been.    

That's all for today, friends.  Thanks for reading!