Sugar Cookie Pops and Glace' Icing

There are two components to this post, the cookie and the icing.  Let's tackle the cookie first.  I told you before that my husbands favorite cake is angel food.  Whenever I make it for him I am faced with 11 leftover egg yolks.  What to do with all those yolks!  Sure there are several options, but what I did last time was make some spritz dough.  My mom's recipe, the one I've been eating my whole life, and the only one worth eating in my opinion, uses only egg yolks, no whites.  Perfect.  So I whipped up a couple batches and threw them in the freezer.  Now using them with a cookie press is always a great idea, but I was curious if you could roll the dough out and use cookie cutters on it.  It worked!!  I think I just found my new favorite sugar cookie, which is actually a spritz! :)  But of course I had to take it a step further and see how they would hold up on a stick- pretty good I think, unless of course you are like my little bug and spin the cookie between your fingers, then it falls off rather easily!  Oops!   

Now onto the icing.  I am always so impressed with how gorgeous and perfect other bloggers cookies look.  Their trick?  Royal icing.  Simple, I thought, I can do that.  Yeah, it didnt go so well.  It worked, sort of, but it wasnt exactly smooth and it never really dried hard, it stayed tacky and it didn't taste good at all!  I was disappointed and resigned myself to never having smooth, dry to the touch, gorgeous cookies.  Until I came across Our Best Bites post on Glace' Icing.  Check out their site for step by step pictures that are really helpful.  I tried it, a little apprehensively, worried that it was going to be a royal icing disaster all over again, but a little hopeful that maybe gorgeous cookies were within my reach afterall.  The piping around the edges went beautifully!  The flooding in the middle was a little more of a trial, but still the end result turned out pretty good I think.  I'm definitely going to try this again as I'm thinking a lot of it is just a matter of practicing and getting a feel for the right consistency of the icing.  The girls loved eating a cookie on a stick and little bug really enjoyed "painting" the cookies.  In the picture below you can see some of her "tie-dye" ones.  I thought they turned out really cute!     

Spritz Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter

2/3 cup sugar

3 egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla

2 1/2 cups flour

*Cream the butter and sugar.

*Beat in the yolks and vanilla.

*Add the flour and mix just until combined.

*Put in a cookie press or shape into a disk and refridgerate to chill (or freeze to use later).  Roll out the dough between two pieces of wax paper sprinkled with powdered sugar.  If the dough warms too much and becomes difficult to pull up the shapes after cutting, just slide the whole wax paper onto a baking sheet and pop it into the fridge to chill a few minutes and try again.Place each cookie shape over a stick and press gently to secure.  Try dipping the stick in egg white first to really help it stick to the cookie, then maybe it will stand up to some swirling. :) 

*Bake at 400 degrees for about 7 min. or until the bottoms just begin to brown. 

Glace' Icing

1 lb of powdered sugar (about 3 3/4 c)

6 T milk (whole is preferred, but others will work too)

6 T corn syrup (1/4 c plus 2T)

1 tsp extract (vanilla, almond, lemon, etc)

*Whisk together the sugar and milk until it is lump-free.

*Stir in the corn syrup and extract.

*It is now the right consistency to glaze.  To pipe, add more powdered sugar until it is thickened and runs off the whisk in a slow thick drizzle.  You will just have to eyeball it and experiment.  Please check out our best bites site here, it will really help you out a lot since I didnt take a lot of pictures and didn't go into detail in my explanation.