My Little Pony Cookies and How to Start Piping a Cookie with Royal Icing

My Little Pony Cookies for Sale  P45/piece

They're made-to-order, and like all our cookies, made with lots of love!

PRICE: P45 / piece. Up to 5 designs. The cookie is 3 inches in diameter. Individually wrapped with acetate and ribbon (they come in blue, pink, yellow, and white)

We do meetups for orders in all LRT 1 / MRT Stations, Trinoma, Munoz, Monumento, Balintawak (handling fee is P100). But for orders of 250 cookies or more, we deliver for free right at your doorstep. :-)

You may contact us via our FB Page, The Sugar Mommy Cookiery for inquiries, or Viber/text us at 0915-989-6965

So how did we make these My Little Pony Cookies? No, we didn't draw them freehand. I could draw on ONE cookie freehand, but to draw on 50 cookies? I wish I could have that kind of a "robotic" hand! Even if I tried, all the ponies wouldn't look uniformly similar to each other. And it would probably take me 10x as long if I didn't rely on some, erm, "tools".

But before we get around to discussing those "tools", let's start with the basics.

What do you need to make a cookie decorated with royal icing?

1) A baked (and cooled) sugar cookie.  Here is one recipe for a sugar cookie
2) A generous amount of royal icing. Here are a few recipes for Royal Icing.
3) Piping bags - here in the Philippines, I use peotraco piping bags-- they're sturdy. And cheaper!
4) Round piping tips (#2 and #3) --- Just go to your baking supplies store and say Round tip #2 and #3--they'll understand what you mean.
5) Couplers --so that you can easily switch from #2 to #3 without changing piping bags
6) Water Spritzer
7) Toothpicks and/or a scribe tool

With all those basics, you're ready to start piping!

Once you have all the things you need, the first thing to do is outline your cookie. Using toothpaste-consistency royal icing,  pipe in a "border" around the shape of your cookie, and let it dry. This line (ideally, we use #3 piping tip for this, but #2 will do) will serve as a "dam" or a "fence" for your icing later on.

Let the outline dry for at least 15 minutes (faster if in front of a fan or air-conditioned room). Then, with slightly thinner icing (consistency is similar to ELMER'S GLUE or HONEY), fill the "hole" inside your "dam".

If bubbles come up to the surface, quickly pop them with a toothpick.

The key to achieving a smooth, even surface on your royal icing-filled cookie is to QUICKLY fill the "hole" within your "dam" while the icing is still wet. Royal Icing dries very quickly--- once it has started to dry, you can't do much to achieve that smooth, even finish (at worst, the surface of your iced cookie would look "madumi", uneven and bumpy).

So long as the icing is still wet, you can do what you want to do with your cookie's royal-icing filled surface. From my experience, a simple "cookie shake" (I gently shake the cookie sideways so that the icing will settle evenly) will ensure a smooth even finish.

That's the most basic way to design a cookie with Royal Icing. Usually, this forms the base of any cookie design. In the case of My Little Pony, my first step was to outline the pony with stiff white icing. Then, I filled it with glue-consistency icing, and let it dry for several hours.

If you're using different colors, and using them side by side (like in the picture--- white and blue) you will have to wait for one color to dry before you apply the other color. Applying a second color while the first one is still wet might make the colors bleed onto each other--- which ruins the design.

More "learnings" to come, soon! Back to my kitchen!

My Little Pony Cookies

Pinky, My Little Pony Cookies

The Birth of the Sugar Mommy - Decorating Cookies with Royal Icing

I've always loved baking cakes. But for the past 6 months, here's what I've been busy with: decorating sugar cookies.

Last October, I was asked by a former childhood friend if I could bake some christening cookies for her client. The question came out of nowhere, the order was unsolicited. I asked her--- how did you come up with the idea of approaching me for this? I wasn't selling any of the things I was baking, just kept posting them online. She said, she had simply assumed because of my baking posts on facebook.  That amused me to bits. 

So I took that as a challenge, to try to learn decorating cookies with royal icing. I was horrible at it. To quote my husband, the stuff I did looked like "a child's doodles" on cookies baked in Home Economics class. Ouch. That hurt. I had wanted to give up. I had wanted to cancel the order and be up front about my capacities--- I wasn't a pro at this, my hands weren't steady enough, I couldn't control the icing, couldn't make them obey what my mind wanted to  do.  

But my husband taunted me--- "and you kept saying baking was what you really wanted to do. now you're quitting?" THAT did it for me. I was challenged. I wanted to  show him that I really loved what I was doing, that I was serious about baking and wasn't going to quit any damn time. 

My first decorated cookies, October 2014:

Pretty awful, right? The lines were wobbly and uncertain, the line weights were inconsistent, the colors were bland, and overall...just very madumi--- not very neat to look at.  

But from that very first order, I didn't stop practicing--- on the job, so to speak. After 2 or 3 orders, my piping started to improve. Thanks to google, youtube, and other available tutorials and informative sources online, I rapidly learned a lot about decorating cookies with royal icing and applied what I learned to the cookie orders I'd been getting. 

So that showed my husband that his wife was no quitter--- and apparently he seemed convinced, so much so that he actually JOINED me. Last December, we unofficially put up an online cookie shop , The Sugar Mommy Cookiery.  December was a great time to begin this kind of business, with people giving all kinds of goodies as gifts.  I was juggling baking cookies with the day job, and with the help of my husband--- who learned how to bake and fill my outlined cookies--- I've managed to keep the juggling going (many times though, sleep, social life, and even time with our daughter had to be sacrificed just to meet the deadlines).

But all in all I'm thankful, because I've found something I am truly passionate about. I can decorate cookies all day and all night, really. I love doing it so much. So many designs I want to make. So many techniques I still want to learn. We always have orders (thank God!), sometimes even two or three in a week (and for us, that's quite a lot already---since we're a two man team and minimum order is 40 pieces)

Our cookies prices start at PhP 35/piece (simple design, less than 3 inches). And each and every piece is made with lots of love. I do this because it's my passion, and when you do something because of passion, I believe it  will reflect on the work.

So, from here on, I think you'll be reading a lot about decorating cookies with royal icing. I'll regularly post pictures of our cookie creations, and if you are in the Philippines, you may place your orders here, too. 

 I will also post tips and "learnings" I've had from this ongoing cookie adventure, for readers who want to learn how to decorate cookies with royal icing, 

So let the Decorated-Cookie Chronicling begin! :-)