Frosting on sugar cookies

bird feeding station and shade plant bed

It is a nice day out there today.  Usually I wait to write my blog posts in the evening, after dark, one of the last things I do in the day.  But today I've decided not to wait and just now went out to snap a picture of part of my yard.  As you can see, there's lots of green, flowers are blooming and the sun in shining.  It is a nice day out there today.

sugar cookie dough

Recently someone asked me about the neatness of the frosting on my frosted vanilla sugar cookies.  First of all, let me say that I love making these sugar cookies.  The dough is very rich, and quite tasty by itself, although that can be said for most cookie doughs, of course.  When it comes out of the bowl, the dough is formed into a disc and wrapped in plastic wrap before going into the fridge for a chill.

rolled out sugar cookie dough

Then the dough is rolled and cut thick.  I want these cookies to be thick and just a bit on the soft side which means that the oven temperature and the baking time have to be just right.

frosted vanilla sugar cookies

And what you get as a finished product is what you see above.  But going to back to what I said earlier... Someone asked me how I get those circles of frosting to come out looking so neat and tidy.  It used to be in days long ago I would hand-spread the frosting.  I would use the back of a dinner spoon to slowly spread the frosting in an ever-widening circle.  This looked nice, but the circles of frosting were never quite circles.  The frosting is not firm when it goes on, it still flows a bit, not much but enough to allow the frosting to set with a smooth surface.  So what to do?  I tried a variety of things over time and eventually settled on a very simple solution:  pastry rings.

I keep a number of pastry rings in my kitchen, two different sizes.  I use them for all sorts of things.  For these cookies, I place the pastry ring on the cooled cookie, centered, and then inside put a measured amount of frosting and coax it to outward until it meets the ring.  Then I just let it sit, not for long, only about 5 minutes.  Any longer and when you pull up the ring a bit frosting tries to stick to it and so you have a frosting edge that is not as neat as it could be.  Pull up the ring too soon, and the frosting is still flowing ever so slowly, but enough that it is not yet ready to retain the circular shape imposed by the ring.  You want to pull up the ring when it is not quite set so that any unevenness caused by ring removal is smoothed over as the frosting settles at its edge.  There's actually a nice margin of error in the timing of the ring removal.  And it's an easy solution that is low-tech and requires something I already have in my kitchen.

Well, today is a nice sunny day, a perfect day for those nice sunny-looking frosted sugar cookies.  I almost always do them in yellow so they always seem sunny.

Go out and enjoy the day, everyone.  It's a wonderful spring.