Hello reader, hello sunshine, hello warmer weather! I hope you are all thriving and have been taking in the beautiful weather over the past week as the sunshine and blue skies have come out to play. For my fellow bloggers that live in the Regina area, this means that opening day of Milky Way Ice-Cream will soon be arriving, and I cannot express how excited I am for a cookie dough twister. For those of you who have never been to Milky Way or even heard of the spectacular summer time ice-cream shop, then I am here to say if you ever get the chance to go, GO! With that being said, my learning project this week was highly inspired by all things sunshine, springtime, and ice-cream! Welcome to my learning project week number five!
If you have never visited my blog before, then you have never been introduced to my topic which is making sugar cookies in all kinds of shapes, as well as attempting to master the art of sugar cookie decorating with royal icing. Last week I worked with a new ingredient as well as a mermaid tail cookie cutter. If you are interested in reading about last weeks adventures, or even any before that, they are all listed under my EDTC 300, Learning Project tab or you can click right here for last weeks post specifically. Without further ado, let us begin this weeks decorating eleganza extravaganza!

This week I used the same sugar cookie recipe that I have used throughout week two to my present week of baking cookies, however, I decided once again to try a new royal icing recipe that I was directly linked to from my trusty cookie recipe. My cookie cutter of choice for this week was an ice-cream cone which helped me decide that I wanted the tops of the cookies to range in different pastel and spring colours. Skipping the baking process this week as it all went smoothly without any problem, I allowed for the cookies to cool and the decorating began. I am visiting my mom at the moment which means I had to pack all of my baking necessities, yet I still forgot the piping bags which means I had to get a little bit crafty and cut the corners off of ziplock sandwich bags. Once I followed the instructions and the recipe for the new royal icing I divided the mixture into four bowls. One quarter pink, another quarter blue, and the last two were split into a green/yellow and then a tan portion for the cone. I put the tan coloured icing into a ziplock bag to begin piping and could tell by the consistency that it was going to be too watery. This was slightly upsetting since I know which icing recipe works, yet I tried for a different one. I moved forward and added more icing sugar to the other three colours hoping to thicken it enough to stay on the cookie without having the icing flood off of the sides and onto the counter.


After the cone section of the cookie dried I went in with pastel blue icing, covered the top portion of the cookie, and then to make it a little bit more visually appealing I added sprinkles for added texture and colour. I repeated these steps with both pink and green/yellow icing, added two different kinds of sprinkles, and the final result was both cute and delicious. This batch of cookies was much larger than the batches I had recently created, so I ate one blue ice-cream cone, packed up the other thirty eight cookies, and drove down to my summer job and left them in the staff room so that others are able to enjoy my creations as well! I have decided to stick with my old royal icing recipe using cream of tar-tar and egg whites despite being so excited to use meringue powder due to the fact that it is thicker, and does not run off the sides of my cookies.

I hope that you all enjoyed reading about my learning project this week, as every week is like stepping into a new adventure and learning about new do’s and do not’s in the baking world. Go outside, enjoy the sunshine, get your favourite Starbucks drink and take the day head on everyday! Spring is here to play, and so am I, I hope you are too! I will see you all next week with another update. If you are wanting to read some extra content here is my first blog post based on my learning project, and here is my Twitter account! See you all again soon!
