Week 12: Adventures in royal icing and a lemony weekend

So many cookies.
Some of my favorites of the bunch
For week 12, I decided that I should work on my cookies and royal icing game. I'm not much for frosting (too sweet!) and my talents in the artistic department are not as strong as I would like them to be. But I'd seem some intricately frosted cookies around and thought that I should maybe dip my toe into the colored royal icing pool. I also wanted to send out a care package to some dear friends who'd recently lost yet another family pet. After riding the high of my macaron success, I whipped up a batch of maple cookies. This was a great excuse to break out some geeky cookie cutters: Erlenmeyer flasks! Beakers! Atoms! The state of Minnesota! It turns out that achieving the proper royal icing consistency for cookie frosting is a little finicky. This batch was a bit thick and the colors were a bit...err...bright. But the coconut rum and maple frosting was still tasty. I told myself that the kids would most certainly like the gaudy colors and off they went in the mail.

Lemon bliss bundt cake
We were also getting into the tail end of Meyer lemon/citrus season and some lemony sunshine sounded like a good idea for the weekend bakes. I started things out with the lemon bliss bundt cake recipe from the King Arthur bake along challenge. It baked up a little darker than I was expecting, but not burnt. The frosting was just the right consistency which was a real confidence booster. In fact, I was so pleased with it that we wound up making a trip out to the Nordicware factory outlet to pick up some supplies. I picked up some new cookie cutters, as well as a couple of new bundt pans. Because who doesn't like a bundt?

Spice cookies with lemon icing. Less day-glo = better.
Next on the agenda was to make some more cookies for more royal icing practice. I'd been reading up and wanted to take another crack at it. I went with a spice cookie and made the royal icing with lemon and Cointreau. I was a little more cautious with my coloring and had a nice pastel palette going. It was quite fun to make the little butterflies as well as the other patterns, particularly the flowers. I did find the decorating to be a little tedious, however; the focus and steady hand that it takes meant that I was not moving particularly quickly and it was a long night of frosting. The end results were a tremendous improvement, however.

Paper thin lemon slices, at the ready.
Last on the list was another citrus bake that I'd been wanting to try for some time - Shaker lemon pie. Full disclosure: I am a lemon fiend. And a pie made with whole lemons was an intriguing proposition. I'd gained confidence with the Hoosier sugar pie and the buttermilk pie, and it seemed to me that maybe simple is better. I went with the Meyer lemons and the end result was quite lovely - something akin to a marmalade pie. What's not to like? The crust browned up nicely and the filling also set up well. Most importantly, no soggy bottom. Suffice to say that, after this lemony weekend, our house was definitely a scurvy-free zone.

Shaker lemon pie
Just a sliver...to start.





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