Painting Cookies for New Year's Eve

During Holidays Handmade Week (check out all 30 fantastic tutorials here, if you missed them) Valerie Mangan guest blogged with ideas that mixed cookies and crafting.  Among those ideas, she stamped and painted on her cool tag shaped cookies:

Aren't they fab?  And who doesn't want to mix cookies with crafting?  I hunted down the meringue powder and gel food coloring from her instructions and a wonderful New Year's Eve edible craft project was born!

First of all, I cheated.  Five hours of chilling dough seemed like five hours too long for this impatient gal.  So I raided my Mom's freezer and found some frozen "break and bake" style sugar cookies from Whole Foods in there.  Twelve minutes in the oven and done!

I have to admit that they were kind of lumpy and fat, but they were cookies and they were done, so score one for Mom's freezer!

Next up I made a batch of Royal Icing.  Valerie was 100% right when she said it's all about the water.  After a bit of experimentation (and scraping icing off of half the cookies) I finally found the right consistency.  Yummy, drippy, perfectly smooth Royal Icing.

Valerie said to let the icing harden overnight.  I danced around the cookies staring at them and poking them.  I posted a picture on facebook and asked if I really had to wait overnight.  The answer was a resounding "no!"  Just the answer I was looking for!

Once the icing had crusted over and was relatively hard to the touch, I pulled out the paintbrushes (brand new paintbrushes -- never touched by paint) and the gel food coloring.  I had four colors: brown, blue, red, and yellow.  I turned a plate into a palette and mixed up some green and purple and orange and then I went to town!

I have to admit that it was a little bit freaky to eat these painted cookies.  Just not used to putting a big garden doodle in my mouth, you know?  But they were so much fun to make!  Definitely an edible craft to try again!

Thanks for stopping by!