What's better than a yummy sugar cookie... with a cherry on top?
No cherry-shaped cookie cutter? No problem. Try a bone-shaped cutter instead.
What You Need:
One batch
Vanilla Sugar Cookies
Royal Icing in red, green & white
Bone-shaped cookie cutter (or heart-shaped cutter)
Decorating tips 3, 5, 352
3 Decorating bags
2 Small zip-top baggies
To cut the cherry shape, I preferred using the bone cutter to the heart cutter because I liked the longer stems and smaller cherries than a heart cutter would give me. (But a heart cutter would absolutely work... or a cherry cutter, of course.)
After you cut out the bone, use a spatula (or knife) to cut the top half at an angle. Again, I found that cutting it taller, rather than trying to get two out of each shape, worked better for the look I wanted. Try a couple of different shapes, though, to see what you like best!
To prepare your icing, you want to make one recipe of
royal icing.
Color about 1/2 of it red, 1/4 green and 1/4 stays white. Load icing bags with tip #3 for red & white. Load green with a tip #5. (To make cleanup a whole lot easier, and keep your icing from drying out, use
Icing Bag Bullets for the icing you will pipe.)
For icing in the consistency to "flood" the cookies, you want to add water about 1 tsp. at a time until a drop "disappears" back into the icing by the count of 10. You only need to thin out the red icing. Thin about 2/3 of what you colored to a flooding consistency. Pour that into a zip-top sandwich bag.
Begin by making the cherry outline. Use a tip #3, and be sure to make the little divot in the top of the cherry for the stem. I liked that look better than just doing circles or ovals for the cherries.
Add the stems with your green icing and tip #5. Turn the cookie so that the cherries are away from you, and the back of the bag is pointing towards you. Start the stem at the cherry, and end it at the point of the cookie. Add a small dot at the point where the two stems meet.
To flood the cherries, cut a
very small tip out of the corner of the bag. Squeeze gently to allow the icing to flow. Keep the tip of the bag
in the icing as you push the bag around the outlined area. If you need to, use a toothpick to help get the icing into the corners or small spaces.
I like to add the white accent while the red icing is still wet so that it can kind of sink in a little.
Isn't it cute??
If you want to add some leaves, use your tip #352. Hold it so that the tip looks like little fish lips... with one of the "points" touching the cookie. You squeeze to get the leaf nice and fat, then slowly pull the tip away while you relax your pressure a little to create a point on the end of the leaf.
In the end, I think I like the ones without leaves better than those with them. Either way, I think they're awfully sweet little cookies.
Click the Link Below to See:
Cookie Decorating Ideas
Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cake
Cheery Cherry Cake
What a clever use of a dog bone cookie cutter! :)
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