0 Decorated Sugar Cookies

For September's Daring Bakers' challenge hostess Mandy of "What the Fruitcake" asked everyone to make decorated sugar cookies. I've never been a fan of rolled sugar cookies. Maybe because I suck at rolling out anything at all. Whether it's a pie crust or cookie dough, I'm just not good at it. I'm an even lesser fan of decorated sugar cookies. Maybe it's because I suck at decorating especially when it involves piping. And for the record, I am also not a fan of those "ace-of-cakes-cake-boss" cakes.

Mandy chose a sugar cookie recipe from Peggy Porschen. I had no idea who she is so I had to Google her. She is the pastry chef/proprietor of a bespoke cake business in the UK. After checking out her website I realized that her work seemed familiar to me. It turns out that the publishing house Clarkson Potter had sent me a courtesy copy of her book "Simple Spectacular Cakes". Her work with cakes and cookies is absolutely stunning, but I still wouldn't want to waste my calories on a decorated sugar cookie. I always find sugar cookies way too sweet. And when you add the icing on top, well, that's just a toothache waiting to happen.



Mandy also wanted our cookies to showcase what September means to us. September has always meant back to school. But it also means that the California apple season is in full swing. So I decided to decorate my sugar cookies like apples.

I decorated my cookies using the using the "flooding" method. “Flooding” a cookie is a technique used when covering a cookie with royal icing. First, using the royal icing, I outlined the area I want to flood. The outline acts as a dam. Then I filled or flooded inside the outlined area. My flooding did not go as well as I hoped. To get a good flood of icing, the icing must be at the correct consistency. I thought that my icing was fluid enough to fill the area that I had outlined, but it was still too thick. So to cover the surface I had to spread the icing using the tip of the pastry bag. And while I was spreading it around with the pastry tip, more icing was flowing out of the pastry bag onto the surface. So my cookies ended up with a pretty thick layer of icing.

I'm not very good at decorating so I thought my apple cookies just seemed a bit sad and pathetic. So I came up with a plan to sandwich the apples cookies with a salted caramel filling and shove a stick in it. Ta-dah! Caramel apples on a stick!



I made the salted caramel filling by making a caramel sauce and adding a healthy pinch of Maldon sea salt. When the sauce cooled down I added a little bit of room temperature butter and some powdered sugar until I liked the consistency.



The finished cookies were still way too sweet for me and a little difficult to eat on a stick, but they were way more interesting than what I had before.

The fine print:
The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of "What the Fruitcake?!" Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.


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