Mastering the Art of the Cookie Cutout

Mastering the Art of the Cookie Cutout

Cookies aren’t just delicious food; they can be an amazing thing of beauty too! If you get your cookie cutout right and master some of the basics of baking, then you can start to experiment with ensuring your cookies are not just the best tasting, but the coolest looking cookies out there, too, to impress your friends (or your kid’s buddies).

The Material of the Cookie-Cutter For a Better Cookie Cutout

Before you actually start to cut the cookies into their works of art, you need to make sure you have your materials perfected. Ask any artist and they will tell you that you need to work with the right supplies and equipment.

Tips for the Perfect Dough

You’ll want to master the perfect dough before you start cutting out and turning your cookies into exciting designs. This is easier said than done, but with a bit of practice, you can create the perfect dough foundation.

• Double chill the cookie dough. Once you’ve made your dough, you need to chill it. Not everybody realizes just how important this is, but a single chill isn’t necessarily enough. Put it in the fridge as a clump of dough for the first cooling period, but once you have cut it into smaller shapes, chill it again to ensure that the cookies stay in a firm shape throughout the cooking.
• Cut to around ¼ inch to ½ inch. This is the correct sort of size to ensure they are cooked throughout but that the bottoms don’t burn.

Tips For Perfect Royal Icing

Royal icing is one of the key components to creating an impressive look. You need to make sure you get the perfect icing texture first and foremost.

• Use saran wrap or a damp towel on top of the icing, which means that it won’t harden when it isn’t in use or being spread.
• Add glycerin if you want a softer texture in the icing.
• Add meringue powder if you want to make a quicker-setting mixture. You can experiment with this in future batches.

Simple Techniques to Make Your Cookies Into Art

Ready to go to the next level and create something that looks amazing? Combine some of these techniques with your favorite cookie cutters for a truly impressive look.

Utilize Sprinkles and Granulated Sugar

It is easy to make some errors with royal icing. If it dries in a clump or your lines are not quite right, you can still salvage the situation. By using some sprinkles like band-aids, you can make it look like this is how you meant to make it look after all. If you mix water and meringue powder or caster sugar, you can also cover up dried areas.

Marbling

Piping can scare people, but you have a much bigger margin for error if you want to use marbling instead. Among some flood icing, you can just put some simple lines of food color and start to swirl and circle it around to create an interesting look. You can then dunk the cookie fronts into the mixture. They’ll all look really interesting and unique, and you don’t have to worry about being quite so precise.

Brush Embroidery

For beginners, brush embroidery is a tough thing to learn how to do, but it quickly becomes easier. Hey, you get to practice while making all those delicious cookies, right? It involves piping the mixture onto the cookies in a variety of different shapes before quickly brushing them to give a different texture and cover more space. Things like shell effects are relatively simple to create in this way.

There are some great tutorials for learning how to do brush embroidery on your cookies, and the technique can be used in other areas of baking too.

Vintage Crackle Background

A vintage look for your cookies? Yes, it is possible, and it looks great. This technique means painting the cookies with food coloring before you bake them. When they bake, you’ll get a crackling that makes them take on a natural and vintage look. This sort of background can also be excellent for making things like leaf designs from your cookies.