Pumpkin Cookies-Working with Royal Icing

I won a give away!! Susan over on Warm Bunny had a give away before Halloween and I won!  To Read More, Click On The Recipe Title.


 I got lots of goodies from Susan! Anything you could think of to decorate cookies and cupcakes for Halloween is in that basket! That beauty of a cookie cutter up front helped me make cookies not just for Halloween but for Thanksgiving as well. Thank you Susan for all the wonderful goodies ! That pumpkin cookie cutter helped me do something today I've never done before, I used royal icing to decorate the pumpkin cut out cookiesI made today. Talk about a team effort! The cookie cutter came from Susan, the pumpkin cut out cookie recipe came from Carol and I got help with the royal icing from Lucy.




I was so excited to do this today, now they're not perfect by any means , but I don't think I did to bad for my first try. I need lots of practice! Which I'll get when I start baking my sugar cookies for Christmas. I've always wanted to do this but just never got around to it. It started with Carols recipe for Gingerbread Men, she'll be posting those when she starts her Christmas Cookie baking. In this recipe Carol uses butterscotch instant pudding, we discussed it and she suggested switching the butterscotch for pumpkin pudding that just so happens to be a limited edition pudding that's out this time of year. I went to the store and there it was in it's own little display on the floor, I got 2 boxes! The only other thing I changed was the amount of ginger in the recipe, I put 1 1/2 tsps of cinnamon and only 1/2 tsp of ginger ( I'm not real fond of ginger)!
The result was a very good cut out cookie! I didn't get a lot of cookies, the cutter was kinda big but that's ok, next time I'll just make a double batch! The kids and my hubby haven't been able to leave these cookies alone!




I made the cookie dough up, the recipe says to let it sit overnight in the fridge,
Carol said her dough didn't need to sit that long so I followed her lead and let it in a couple hours. It was plenty cold enough when I was ready to start rolling them out, I had to let the dough on the counter for a little while to soften up. The cookies came out perfect. I had asked Lucy if she knew of a cookie icing recipe, she asked me if I knew how to "flood" a cookie, no I didn't . She was kind enough to send me a link that had a how to video about piping and flooding cookies. You can find that video here. It looked like something I could do! I looked up a royal icing recipe that you can find here.




The icing was very easy to make, I added vanilla extract to the icing. At this stage it's good for piping around the cookie. To flood the cookie with icing you divide the icing up into what you want to pipe with and what you want to flood with. To make the icing thin enough to flood with just add water to the base recipe until it falls in ribbons from a spoon, then add your color.




I piped the royal icing around the cookie, I need some practice doing this!




Then I flooded the cookies with the royal icing that I thinned down with water. I let the icing dry a little then started decorating.




Trust me there were alot of cookies I couldn't show you because I just didn't do a good job decorating them! But they ate them anyway! I was very happy with myself for even trying to do this, hopefully I get better at it! Here's Carols Ginger Bread Men cut out cookie recipe with my changes.

This is from Best of Country Cookies...

BUTTERSCOTCH GINGERBREAD MEN
1/2 c. butter (no substitutions), softened
1/2 c. packed brown sugar
1 (3.4 oz.) pkg. instant butterscotch pudding mix (I used pumpkin instant pudding)
1 egg
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. ground ginger ( I used !/2 tsp)
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon ( I used 1 1/2 tsp)

FROSTING:
2 c. confectioners' sugar
3 Tbsp. milk
Assorted decorator candies
Raisins

In a mixing bowl, cream butter, brown sugar and pudding mix. Beat in egg. Combine flour, ginger, baking soda and cinnamon; gradually add to the creamed mixture. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
On a lightly floured surface, roll dough out to 1/8" thickness. Cut with a 5" gingerbread man cutter (I didn't measure the cutter-I used a small one-just got more cookies-what's wrong with that???). Place 1" apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake @ 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes or until edges are golden. Remove to wire racks to cool.
In a mixing bowl, combine confectioners' sugar and milk until smooth. Frost and decorate cookies as desired. Makes 1 1/2 dozen. (that's with the big cookie cutter-I got quite a few out of this.