Decorating Halloween Cookies (flooding with royal icing)

Gingerbread houses - that's what I associated with royal icing, until I took a Wilton cake decorating class at my neighborhood Micheal's store.  Now, I know that the egg white and powdered sugar frosting that dries like cement also allows for a beautifully smooth, detailed finish on cookies and cakes.

I would describe my color flow or flooding work as rustic.  It's as nice as the seasonal cookies turned out by  one of my favorite bakeries in Tucson, but it is no where near as fine and precise as the sugar art being turned on my some of the food bloggers I follow. 

I know a couple of American girls living in Poland, and I wanted to send them some Halloween cookies.  So I mixed up half a batch of sugar cookies.  I cut the rolled dough into squares to avoid having to re-roll the scrape dough.  

I made the royal icing from Joy of Baking.  After roughing out my design on paper, I knew that I needed a tiny bit of yellow and green.  I put a small amount of the royal icing in two bowls and tinted it Wilton's gel colors.  I mixed up a larger amount of orange, and left the rest white. 

The first step was to outline the jack-o-lantern face in yellow.  

Next, I outlined the pumpkin in orange.  

Then, a white outline around the cookie edge. 

To fill in the pumpkins, I thinned the orange royal icing with a few drop of water so that it would flow inside the orange outline.  I helped it into tight spaces with the point of a toothpick. 

The white icing was thinned similarly and used to fill in the background.  A green stem was added as a final touch.  The cookies were then allow to dry overnight before packaging. They freeze very well, and the decorating possibilities are endless.   

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