6967. Take a cookie decorating class

I always wanted to learn how to decorate cookies using royal icing. Royal icing scares me to make. I also didn't want to buy all the ingredients and not have it turn out. When Kimberly library was offering a cookie decorating class for adults, I jumped at the opportunity to sign up.  This was free versus the $60 my online book group wanted to charge me to do it virtually.

The class was being taught by a local cookie decorator and assisted by a teen who took a summer school course on cookie decorating. She provided all the materials -- pre-baked the cookies, pre-made the royal icing and put it in piping bags for us, and gave us all the other tools we would need.

Our instructor first demonstrated on how to ice each type of cookie individually. First you trace the outline of the cookie. This helps keep the icing on the cookie. This can be challenging to drip and drop along a cookie but it does not need to be perfect. This should be done with a really skinny tip on your piping bag. Too big of an opening will cause a mess.

After the cookie is outline, then you fill it in. It's actually pretty simple to do. The hardest part I think would be making the royal icing and making sure you don't cut too big of a tip on the icing bags.

The last step is to add the details. To make the flowers on the flip flops, you make a circle with the royal icing and then pull out lines to make petals. As it dries it will sink in.

To make the waves, we just drew a tiny line and then using a paintbrush, pulled down the icing until it looked like waves. For the sand we just added some extra tan icing and dabbed it to make it look like sand. 

For the most part these basic techniques are just that.. basic. They are not that hard to complete and the cookies look really good. I'm sure they are more advanced techniques but I'm happy with the basic. If anyone would make royal icing for me I would totally decorate cookies like this the future especially if the royal icing doesn't get crunchy like this one. It stayed soft even the next day. It actually tasted good.

It was a fun 90 minutes decorating cookies. I hope they do it again because it is easy and fun. No need to stress about it. No need for it to look perfect if all you are doing is eating them.