How to make personalized cookies

amother

Sun, Jun 12 2022, 8:14 pm

IyH making a kiddush soon. I’d love to have gorgeous personalized cookies, but I don’t want to pay for it since they are expensive to order. I want to try making them myself… any ideas/products to help make it easier? Can someone walk me through it?
I’m assuming I need to make a basic sugar cookie recipe, and cut it into the shapes/initial I want. But beyond that I’m clueless. Do I use fondant? Never used that before, any tips?
Any decorating ideas? I don’t mind ordering things as it would still be cheaper then the few dollars a cookie ordering them from a professional would cost me.

Amarante

Sun, Jun 12 2022, 10:03 pm

I went through a phase of learning how to do the gorgeous decorated cookies. I even took a cookie decorating class and bought some books.

You don't use fondant to ice the sugar cookies. You use something called Royal Icing which is essentially meringue (beaten egg whites) and confectioner's sugar. It hardens to a beautiful shiny finish. The royal icing is either white or dyed in the color you want - there are special food colors that are used and they come in gorgeous colors - not just the ones in the little bottles in the grocery store.

It has been a while since I did it but what I was taught (and practiced) is that you ice the entire cookie to get the base icing. You then make up little "fences" which delineated the areas that you want to decorate or color. Then you flood the fence with the color inside the fence. And then when that all has hardened you pipe in details or use fancy decorating stuff like colored sugar or gold or whatever.

There are cookie decorating places on the web that carry all of this stuff. Of course you need piping bags but you can actually use Glad Bags with a corner punched out and the icing tip put in instead of buying real bags.

There are also things that colored ink and edible marking pens that are much easier to use but not as fancy.

There is a reason that those beautiful cookies are expensive because it is very tedious to do it - especially at home because you have to deal with multiple containers of color icing depending on what you want to do and wait for the icing to harden before you proceed to the next step. I gave it up as a hobby because people were just as happy to eat my "ugly" cookies LOL

And you have to mix up the Royal Icing and keep it at the proper consistency

I would suggest Youtube to give you a sense of what the process looks like which is what my decorating class was good for but also a book will give you a better idea of the step by step process.

Amarante

Sun, Jun 12 2022, 10:28 pm

amother [ Pink ] wrote:

Seems like the world's biggest tircha

Yes it is a huge potchke which is why all of my cookie decorating supplies including gorgeous cutters are in the closet next to other "hobbies" I have abandoned.

One of the reasons why it is more difficult for a home baker to do is that there is no scale the way there would be with a professional decorator. The professional might be doing 50 cookies and so can effectively make up all of the colors needed but if you are only decorating relatively few you have to make up small quantities of the colored icing.

The other potchke is sandwich cookies - not as bad as decorated cookies but you still have to make sure that you have the right size and number and then do the inside.

There are ways to have pretty cookie cutter cookies more simply with beautiful frosting sugar which comes in loads of colors as well as the colored beads which also come in silver and gold as well as multiple colors. They also do small sprinkles in various shapes and sizes so you can buy tiny blue Jewish stars (for example) and sprinkle them over cookies and they are very pretty.

amother

Maize

Sun, Jun 12 2022, 10:30 pm

I do this professionally. if you’ve never done it before, it may be fun for you to attempt, but it’s harder then it looks, and chances are you won’t be able to replicate the ones you see on Instagram for your kiddish… getting a professional clean look takes practice. But besides for the cookies, you’d then need meringue powder, that’s a big part of the royal icing recipe. You can probably find gel colors on Amazon. You’d need piping bags. cookie decorators use a scribe to play with the icing but a newbie would be able to use a toothpick. Do a look at YouTube and watch a couple videos!