Fall Cookie Day!

My back hurts

There is frosting on my shirt

My hands (and tongue :-P) are stained with food coloring

Yep...it's cookie baking/decorating day!

This morning when I began working on my fall cookies, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I used this tutorial I found online on how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing. The recipe for the cookies and the icing came from that page. It looked simple enough, and there were step-by-step directions. How hard could it be?

What I wasn't prepared for was the fact that the cookies would take 7 hours to complete. Granted, I can be a little slow with things like this b/c I tend to be a little OCD :-P And I had to stop a few times and lie down because I'm still not feeling well (Remember how I supposedly ate bad chicken last Saturday? Yeah, well it turns out it wasn't the chicken. I've had a mild case of the stomach flu for SEVEN DAYS! Not fun. But I think it has just about run it's course. And just so I don't get 50 comments asking if I'm pregnant...I'm NOT. 100% sure! :-)). But anyway, yeah. they took FOREVER. I wish I had baked the cookies earlier in the week so all I had to do was decorate them today. But I just never found time, plus all I wanted to do was lie around all week since I was sick.

I can't believe how few cookies the recipe actually made since it feels like I cut out and decorated about 500 of them! I think it's my fault that it didn't make too many because I have a tendency to not roll my dough out thin enough. I'll try to do better next time! Both the cookies and the icing ended up tasting really delicious, though! And the icing was so easy to work with, and so easy to make! I'll definitely be making it again for Halloween and Christmas :-)

So anyway, enough talk. Here are some pictures of my day! It cracks me up that the lighting changes so much throughout the pictures because it was 11:00 or 12:00AM when I started, and about 7:00PM (DARK) when I finished! I told you it took forever ;-)

I set up what I like to call a "baking studio" in the kitchen. which just means I cleared everything off of the counter, moved the table to the middle of the room, put my computer in there to easily access both recipes, and hung a trash bag on the outside of the waste basket for convenience :-)
While I was cutting cookies out of the dough, I had the genius idea of making it look like this apple had a bite taken out of it. That's about as far as my creativity goes :-P
Two hours later, the cookies were finally cut out, baked, and cooled. The table then became the decorating station
The first step in decorating the cookies was to pipe a border onto each cookie, creating a little boundary line for later on when I flooded the cookies. this took approximately 7 years to complete ;-)
Next I added more water to the frosting, put it in a squeeze bottle, and flooded the cookies. Then I had to take a tooth pick and smooth out the watery frosting and make sure it reached the edges. This took even longer than piping the borders.
And last but not least, I added fun little details.

And without further adieu, here are my completed cookies!
Yep, that's really all I made in 7 hours!

Lots of leaves (HATING the lighting in these pictures. It was dark by this time):
And apples (my bitten apple makes a second appearance while another one has a worm crawling out):
My personal favorite...squirrels and acorns
Can't forget about the pumpkins and Jack-o-Lanterns!

So it was a fun day! Luke decided not to decorate any because I think he thought the whole process was just too time-consuming. Maybe next time he will :-)

Luke was really sweet tonight since I wasn't feeling well. I told him I'd rather just stay in and relax tonight. So Luke went out to Subway and brought us supper. I hadn't eaten all day because I was just a little nervous to, but luckily it tasted great and I still feel fine :-) Also, we both just got really into The Office, so yesterday Luke borrowed the first four seasons on DVD from a guy at work. I plan on just relaxing and watching them for the rest of the evening. I love lazy fall Saturday nights! This is what weekends are supposed to be like :-)

I better get going...I have a disastrously messy kitchen to tend to. Seriously, it looks like a tornado went through!