ACHELORETTE PARTIES can sometimes mean a never-ending supply of tequila shots, an obscene amount of phallic-shaped party favors, and
stuffing dollar bills into a police officer's rippling banana hammock. Fortunately the bride-to-be wanted a low-profile trip to Napa to get some R&R and take time away from the stresses of wedding planning.
I couldn't attend so I thought it would be nice to send her some bachelorette-appropriate goodies. I enlisted Sherri from
Sherri's Sweet Treats (Her cupcakes are unreal
—fan her
Facebook page!) to make some lingerie cookies with me. We used heart-shaped sugar cookies (there are so many
types of cookies you can make with them!) royal icing, pearls and non-pareils for all the bows and frills.
We didn't get a chance to snap any pictures of the ones we made, but it takes a little bit of skilled handiwork to get these looking pretty as the ones pictured above. As Sherri and I both discovered, it gets pretty tiring applying pearls individually. We learned some useful lessons along the way:
- Line your cookie with the shape of whatever you're working on. As a reference, the icing for the outline needs to have a toothpaste-like consistency.
- Flood your cookie with a thinner, runnier icing than the icing used in the previous step. Use a toothpick to fill in the lines if necessary, or gently shake the cookie to get the icing to settle.
- Use tweezers to apply the pearls evenly to your cookie while icing is still wet.
- Start off with just a few colors, and do everything methodically (i.e. line all cookies first, let dry, flood to fill cookie, then decorate with other colors). Royal icing dries fairly quickly so it can be chaotic trying to use a ton of colors without knowing your game plan.
- Keep a spray bottle handy for spraying into your royal icing to thin (If you don't believe me, then take her word for it! Sweet Sugar Belle, the cookie-decorating goddess, swears by this.)
Please feel free to leave suggestions you may have; I'd love to hear your input. :)
Thanks,
Margaret
Y SWEETHEART of a sister volunteers for an ocean conservation center in San Francisco and wanted to let them eat cake on the last day together. Naturally, a wave of excitement washed over me (pardon the puns... they can't be helped today) and I remembered a Bakerella-inspired turtle cupcake I had seen in the past that would rise to the occasion.
