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Icing cookies is easier than it looks

Daniel Neman Tribune News Service

Cookies are good. Icing is good. And according to baker Christy Augustin, that is important to remember when you try to decorate cookies.

“Just forgive yourself. It’s going to taste great even if it doesn’t look good. It just takes practice,” she said.

Augustin is co-owner of Pint Size Bakery & Coffee in St. Louis’ Lindenwood Park. The bakery is in the process of making hundreds of decorated cookies for this holiday season, but Augustin said the process is easy enough that most home cooks can do it themselves.

Begin with a sturdy cookie, one that is easy to work with. At Pint Size, that is often a gingerbread or a sugar cookie. They roll the dough out about ¼-inch thick and use a cookie cutter for specific shapes.

For the decorations, Augustin uses royal icing, a mixture of powdered sugar, cream of tartar and egg whites – if you don’t have the egg whites, you can buy meringue powder and mix it with water, she said. Color the icing with food coloring or, preferably, food coloring gel.

Most professional bakers prefer to pipe an outline of icing on the edges of their cookies and then fill the space in between, she said, but she prefers the method explained by St. Louis cookbook author Julia M. Usher. She just spreads the icing on top of the cookie with the back of a spoon. Then she allows the icing to dry uncovered at room temperature for a day, which makes the cookies easier to handle and avoids any unfortunate instances of poking your finger into the wet icing.

Next comes the piping. For a Christmas tree, she zig-zags a line of light green icing down the cookie, to represent the branches, and carefully places sugar pearls at strategic spots to suggest ornaments. For Santa’s hats, she pipes white frosting across the bottom to look like white fur and adds a dot of white on top to represent a fluffy puffball. A sprinkling of nonpareils over the white parts adds sparkle.