The Braekery: Star Wars Sugar Cookies: Flood Addition

You may recall when I started this blog back in 2010, I goal was to make Star Wars Cookies that looked like this

Well, today I am one step closer to this awesomeness.

This past weekend I learned how to flood cookies! YAY!

What is flooding, you ask? It's a technique that I've been reading on some of may favorite baking blogs like Bake At 350 and have wanted to try for years. It's how you get your icing to looks super smooth; like the picture above.

Here's a video to give you an idea of how it works.

Since my royal icing sucks, I decided to try out her recipe as well, which I have decided that I like much, much better than mine.

4 tbsp meringue powder
scant 1/2 cup water (as in not quite)
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 - 1 tsp light corn syrup

Combine the meringue powder and water. With the paddle attachment of an electric mixer, beat until combined and foamy.
Sift in the powdered sugar and beat on low to combine. (Do NOT skip the sifting!)
Add in the corn syrup and extract if desired. (I added almond extract)
Increase speed to med-high/high and beat for about 5 minutes, just until the icing is glossy and stiff peaks form.
(You should be able to remove the beater from the mixer and hold up and jiggle without the peak falling.) Do not overbeat.
Cover with plastic wrap touching the icing or divide and color using gel paste food colorings.
This "stiff" icing is perfect for outlining and even for building gingerbread houses and monogramming. To fill in your cookies, add water to your icing a teaspoon at a time, stirring with a rubber spatula, until it is the consistency of syrup. This technique of filling a cookie with thinned icing is called "flooding." - Royal Icing 102

Now, before I show you my flooded cookies, lets take a trip in time to see my Star Wars cookie progress so far.

June 2010

Remember us? Don't you wish you could forget again?

July 2010

A little bit better? I'm not so sure.

Well, this time I wanted to do it right. There are 2 reasons for this;

1) Ron's sister and her girlfriend bought me the only set of Star Wars cookies cutters that I didn't have for Christmas! Now I own all of them!! (Thanks Sam and Rico!!)

2) I had been commissioned to make a Boba Fett bag for this really nice guy to give to his girlfriend for Christmas, but I underestimated the time it would take to get there and it didn't arrive in time! I was horrified, but they were really great about it, so I decided to make and mail them some Star Wars cookies to make it up to them.

So I started off by outlining the cookies

Note: Don't waist time with details that you'll just end up flooding over and having to redo. Learn from my mistake. Let that fully dry before adding the flooded icing.

As you can see, most of the detail is hidden, and what isn't didn't turn out as well as I wanted.

You may also notice that some of the scalloped cookies seem to have stuff on them. Well, Sam and Rico also got me the Star Wars Cupcake Stencil Set so I decided now was the perfect time to try them out.

These bad boys are curved slightly for cupcakes, so they didn't quite sit flat, which made them a little hard to use. Also, coloured sanding sugar is a little too coarse to work properly, a shimmer dust would've worked much better. As it were, I went wit icing sugar and it worked pretty well. Since I was already using the sifter, I sifted the sugar to get a nice soft, even coat.

Finally, once all the flood icing is dry, you can add the detail back on and voila, your cookies are done!

Tie fighters are hard to decorate... Oh and that weird Death Star was me trying out some food colour markers that I got for Christmas

I like the black outlined Darth Vader's better that the white

Is it just me or does this picture remind you of KISS?

So, I know I'm not up to professional quality yet, but I do totally think that I'm on my way. Practice makes perfect, right?
Now, all that was left was to package some of them up and mail them. I used this guide from Allrecipes and I think I did pretty good. I can't wait til they receive them! Hopefully they'll all be in one piece. They seem like such a nice Star Wars couple. He even sent me pictures of her with her new bag!

isn't she adorable? What a great Christmas gift ;p

Speaking of Christmas, check out some of the awesome things I got!

My mom got me heart measuring cups and spoons!!! YAY!