Decorating Sugar Cookies

The main reason I like sugar cookies is because of the beautiful decorations that can be done on them. While I was researching about this subject I came across many recipes for icing the cookie. The most popular is the royal icing made with either meringue powder or egg whites. This didn´t really sound too appealing to me and I was afraid it would taste bad. I still wanted the beautiful appearance royal icing has so when I found a recipe using powdered sugar, corn syrup and milk that claimed to be a great substitute for royal icing I was thrilled!Here's the recipe:

1 cup of powdered sugar
1 tablespoon of milk

2 drops of lemon juice

1 tablespoon of light corn syrup

1 teaspoon clear vanilla extract

food coloring (optional)

While I was reading one of my favorite blogs Glorious Treats(http://glorioustreats.blogspot.com/) I found a post on how to organize your decorating station. I really liked the idea and I created my own as you can see above. This worked very well for me. Unfortunately the words on the image look very small and you can hardly read it but basically the different parts are : a working area which is where you place the cookies you will be decorationg, a tray to place the already decorated cookies to dry, a rack where the cookies wait to be decorated , and a cup with a damp cloth at the bottom to place the royal icing bags while their not in use. This is a very efficient way to work and I highly recommend it.

The icing looks very pretty when it is still fresh..however I had problems later on...

I outlined in two colors pink and orange.

My hand was a lot steadier than i thought it would be an these little hearts actually turned out kinda cute.

After outlining I thinned by icing for flooding. My flood colors were green, pink and blue. I also decorated some of the cookies with dots. This can be doen by simply adding dots to the flooded cookies while they are still wet. You can't really see them that well in this picture and some of the cookies have crumbs on them (lol) but it's the only picture I have since I forgot to take some while i was flooding and making dots.
They looked very pretty when they were still wet but once they dried the colors faded out and were very pale. this was very dissapointing since i had worked so hard on them. I'm going to be making these again so i can try and fix the icing to make the colors brighter and glossier. I will let you know how ir goes. I packed up the cookies in packs of three and tied a nice yellow ribbon around them. These were all eaten my family who said they were very good! You can see the recipe for the cookies here: http://summerofbaking.blogspot.com/2010/06/sugar-cookies-attempt-1_28.html#comments