I have never used anything to ice my cookies, but Wilton's Snowwhite Buttercream Recipe. I love the effects that you can obtain from the Royal Icing. My only experience with Royal Icing Was to make extremely hard icing Figures like the kind you buy in the grocery store and the taste wasn't that great. I can't imagine using this on a cookie. I can just picture someone cracking a tooth or something, LOL. I always thought that any type of grease would break it down too. Is this true? I love doing cookies more than cakes and I have so enjoyed this sight and getting my questions answered. Hope someone can help by answering this one

Yes, grease will definitely break it down. One thing to do is boil your couplers and tips to make sure they have NO grease on them. Sorry, I can't help you much on decorating the cookies, maybe some one else can.

Good Luck!

I always use royal icing on my cookies (the recipe posted by Antonia74), and no one has ever complained. I don't eat them, because it's too sweet for me, but I've never gotten any feedback about them being too hard. I'm making a batch this weeknd, so I'll test it out...

try my thinned royal icing recipe, posted in the Recipe section or in the Cookie Tutorial i did for this site. Because you use water to thin it down, it's not "teeth breaking" at all.

All the cookie photos I have posted use this recipe. SO easy to use and tastes deeee-lish!!

I'll vouch for Antonia74's recipe - she did an awesome job on the "how to bake and decorate cookies" article!

Hers is the first recipe I tried, and it was so good I haven't ever gotten around to trying any of the others I intended to make.

I am not a pro by any stretch of the imagination, but I have made some nice cookies using her method, although I do prefer to use the squeeze bottles instead of bags if I'm doing a lot of cookies. There are a few pictures of my cookies in my photos here, if you want to see what a rookie can do, LOL!

Laura.

Rookie, my Aunt Fannie, slejdick, I just checked out your "rookie cookies", and they look like a pro did them to me!!! I know antonia74s cookies were wonderful, so I had to check out your too, Beautiful!!!!

it's true Slejdick!! Your cookies are VERY pro!

Awww, shucks.

Thanks guys!

Antonia74, can your royal cookie icing be made chocolate, or would coloring it brown have to do? I am doing cowboy boots and hats for my dad, and was debating whether to do chocolate royal (need to find recipe for) or just color the royal brown & tan. Thanks!

Deb

i've tried to make chocolate before (omitting just a bit of the icing sugar for equal parts of cocoa), and it all looked (and tasted/smelled) great until the next day....

The cookies dried with a nasty kind of white bloom on them. Like chocolate that is old, you know?

Not certain why? Very disappointing! I've tried a few times and this always seems to happen?

I have made antonia74's icing chocolate....I just added enough cocoa powder to get the color I was after once the icing was completely made to the directions and then added water to thin it to the consistency I needed and it worked out great...tasted good too....I just used it on valentine's day cookies because I was mixing brown with other colors...and didn't have any brown coloring and everyone raved about the flavor...so I say it CAN be done. The look of them didn't change after a few days at all...in fact my mom didn't want to eat her cookies because she thought they were so pretty and she still has them and they don't look any different at all! I will see if I can attatch a photo. Here is a close up of the cookies as well...so you can see that the chocolate icing looks IMO just as wonderful as the rest of the icing. I love antonia's recipe...and like others it was my first and only attempt at a royal icing recipe and I haven't tried any others because this one is so successfull.

Great looking cookies! Thanks all for the input!

deb