I have a little bit of a cookie cutter collecting habit. As a result, I’ve been trying out different cookie recipes and icing techniques for a while now. Usually at the same time.

The cookies above were a combination of a cookie (Tea & Almond Cookies from a recipe book) and icing (Bake at 350’s Royal Icing 102) recipe.

The cookie recipe included almond meal and two teabags worth of English Breakfast tea, which had a lovely flavour but definitely needed the icing to sweeten it up.

The icing was another a refinement of my recipe workaround (some ingredients are hard to find here). I’ve tried whole egg powder before, because I couldn’t find meringue powder, and it worked well enough though the icing had a yellowish tint. Recently I found powdered egg white in the body building section of health food stores so I’ve switched to that. I also using icing ‘mixture’ instead of powdered sugar, as the corn flour in it seems to work fine as a substitute for corn syrup. I also find the eggy flavour of royal icing needs to be masked with some sort of flavouring essence (so far peppermint works well, vanilla not so much, and I’ve yet to try almond). Of course, the US cup measurements are different to Australia, too.

Other cookie experiments I’ve tried include pressing stamps into the cookie dough. But because the cookies swelled up a little during baking the impression all but disappeared. I also bought some food colouring pens, but they tend to break the surface of the icing.

On my list of things to try are white chocolate icing, fondant icing, and stamping with food colouring ink pads. But I prefer to cook when there’s an event I can take cookies to, because after going to all that effort it’s nice to show them off… and then we don’t end up eating them all ourselves.