Adventures in Cookie-ing

I've been wanting to try my hand at these decorated sugar cookies for some time, so when a friend asked me if I had a recipe for them I took that opportunity to jump in & offer to help. She wanted to make princess themed cookies for her daughter's 4th birthday party. So we gathered all the supplies, she came over & we got to work. Our adventure certainly wasn't without a few hiccups, but all in all I think the results are still cute. Here's what our adventure looked like:

First important ingredient needed for cookie baking with a friend in the evening when all children are tucked into bed:

I made the dough ahead of time & it chilled in the fridge for a few hours before we started to roll it out. You can use any sugar cookie dough you find. The one we used had a bit of lemon extract in it for a little something extra...yum!

When the dough was good & chilled we started rolling it out. As soon as we started to roll the dough became extremely sticky & was impossible to work with. We thought our adventure was about to come to a quick end. But all was saved with about a pound of flour. We floured the heck out of the dough and it began to cooperate.

Next step was to cut our shapes. We did crowns & castles to go with the princess theme.

We put them on parchment paper lined baking sheets & baked them for about 12 minutes.

Then we lined them all up on cooling racks to cool completely.

Now it was time for the icing. Royal Icing...how appropriate considering our theme.

When the icing was the right consistency we split it up & colored it.

Then we put it into squeeze bottles.

We used the squeeze bottles to "flood" the cookies. We basically drenched them in icing. It was super clean & neat and wasn't messy at all. Ahem...

This next step actually took place the next night. Yep, you heard me right. We had TWO nights of cookie baking. We let the cookies dry all night & the next night we made another batch of icing, leaving part of it white & coloring some pink & purple. Then we added details to the cookies.

They didn't turn out exactly how we had planned in our heads, but we did the best we could under the circumstances & I think they still turned out adorable!

Hopefully the birthday girl will love her princess cookies!