Printed Sugar Cookies - Week 9 of the 12 Weeks of Cookies Blog Hop

I love these cups, my Aunt got them for me.  Oh and the cookies are super cute too.

  Have I mentioned before that I really like this blog hop thingy? It is really opening my eyes to a bunch of new ideas and great new blogs to read. I think that when I started this out I thought, I will never have anyone but family read this. (Hi Mom, Norma, Lynda and all the rest:) But I think that is the norm, unless you know other bloggers how are you going to get out there and share what you love? Well this hop has really helped and I think that I was just lucky to find it.

  Anyway for this weeks post, I am actually making a cookie. Are you amazed? I am, sort of. I actually wanted a reason to use my edible printer again so it all worked out.

  I wanted to make some really cute Christmas card like cookies, but I could not find any cute designs on google that would work. For some reason or another they would not enlarge without pixilating. And I have no idea what that really means, other than it looks blurry. Hubby tries so hard to work with me, but you know he is secretly thinking about killing me. Or something. Anyway I also did not want to pay for images. You can find many of them on line on places like Etsy.  But since these are just for me and work friends I wanted to keep it cheap.  So I found Tom Kat Studio.  I had read about them on a few other bloggers sites and never took a look until now. 

  Don't check them out right now, because you will be there for hours.  Finish this first then go look, it's only fair, you were here first.  Okay fine, but make sure you come back!

  Alright, so where were we?  Oh yeah cookies.  So I found the cutest printable and got Hubby to figure it out, and we printed them out on my edible printer.  Hubby was patient and got them as close to the size of my cookie cutter as he could.  I then cut them out and left them in the plastic bag the sheets come in so they would not dry out.

  I made a batch of I am Baker's  amazing sugar cookies.  I already posted the recipe here before.  They are to die for and so easy.  My only issue is spreading, which is not as bad as it used to be.  But I am finally going to use a trick I read about on many other blogs.  The latest is University of Cookie, and they explain it well.  Basically as soon as your cookies come out of the oven, use your cookie cutter and cut out the cookie again.  It will trim it up and leave you all these little cookie edges to eat.  Or if you save them, like I did, you can make sugar cookie truffles.  If they turn out I will post them for sure.


These are the cookies right after I used the cutter to trim them.  Once they cooled a bit the extra bits just pull away.

   So I baked my cookies and once fully cooled I mixed up a batch of glaze icing and set to work.  First with thick piping glaze you outline your cookie.  Then with flood icing you just fill it in.  This is the easiest part.  I made my icing white with Americolor soft food paste in white.  If you look at glaze it is white, but not a super bright white like I want, because it gives the perfect background for my printed sheets.

Outlined and ready to fill.

I didn't worry about air bubbles as they are all going to be covered.

   I let them dry over night, and the next day got to work putting the images on.

  I followed what I read up about on Sweetopia.  So I set up with my cookies, a small bowl of light corn syrup, a food only paint brush, my print outs and a wet cloth and a few paper towels.

  To start use your paint brush to brush a thin layer of corn syrup on top of the iced part of the cookie.  Use the damp towel to get any extra corn syrup off your fingers, then the paper towel to make sure your hands are dry.  They have to be dry or the icing sheet with tear.

These are all done, I love how cute the image turned out.

   Take the icing sheet and peel the backing off.  Then line up the icing sheet on the cookie and use your fingers to smooth it out.  Once you are done all the cookies you can start on your boarders.

  I think if you want a really decorative boarder you would need to use royal icing.  And one day I may be brave enough, but not today. So I made my glaze really thick and tinted it red with Americolor super red.

I used a Wilton #2 tip to pipe this boarder.

  I just did a thick line all the way around the cookie and then while it was still wet I took a dry food paint brush and used it to sprinkle red disco dust on.  Make sure that the rest of the cookie is dry or else you will have disco dust stuck everywhere. Once they dried out for a few hours I went back and used a clean dry brush to get off any extra disco dust.

This is just after I put the disco dust off, I let it dry for a few hours they brushed off the extra, there was disco dust every where.

  I think these turned out really cute, and it will work with any image.  Maybe you have family pictures for the holidays, how fun would that be.

  You could also write on these cookies and send a note or something cute.  Maybe even let the kids fill it out and leave it for Santa.

  I usually package these type of cookies in plastic bags tied with ribbon.

You can sort of see the disco dust, in person they really glitter.

These were small enough that I was able to use cake pop bags, much cheaper than the cookie bags I usually use.

* if you don't have a printer and I bet most don't, you can get sheets printed at most bakeries.  If they make image cakes they can do it.  Just be aware that they are charging a lot.  I did mention before that my printer was $35 and the ink was about $95, so if you plan to do this often it is cheap enough to buy.

I make some plain cookies with my extra cookies and decorations.

  Now I also had a few extra cookies and did not want to print out any more icing sheets. So I took a few left over decorations from my Reese cookies thingies and just stuck them on with some light corn syrup.  I then did  a plain red boarder and wrote something on them with Americolor pens. Just simple.  How cute would it be to make gift tags?

Gift tag cookies would be so cool.