Autumn Leaf and Acorn Cookies

Inspired by the onset of fall, and needing to bring a treat to an upcoming meeting, I decided to make some autumn sugar cookies.  I used a generic sugar cookie recipe and made sure to roll the dough thick enough so the cookies wouldn’t be fragile.  I used a brand new oak leaf cookie cutter (purchased at Michael’s with one of those great 40% off coupons), and my trusty old acorn cookie cutter.  I baked the cookies the night before so I wouldn’t have to wait for them to cool the next day. 

For the frosting on the cookies, I used royal icing.   For those who have not worked with royal icing before, it is basically a method of frosting that produces a flat glaze that dries as hard as a rock.  Traditional royal icing recipes call for egg whites, but since I was going to be feeding the cookies to other people, I didn’t want to be responsible for a salmonella breakout.  Fortunately, there is an alternative: meringue powder.  This is simply pasteurized, powdered egg white mixed with some other ingredients like corn starch.   

I happened to have a small jar of Wilton Meringue Powder on hand, so I just used the recipe they included with the packaging.  There were just three ingredients: meringue powder, confectioner’s sugar, and warm water.  I started by adding one tablespoon less water than the recipe called for and split the frosting into two containers.  I added some brown gel food coloring the first container and used this stiff royal icing to pipe outlines onto the cookies.  By the time I’d outlined the last cookie, the icing on the first cookie was dry.   

I added water and yellow food coloring to the second pot of frosting.  I kept adding water a little at a time until the icing flowed slowly but smoothly when dropped onto a flat surface.  While frosting the cookies, if the icing failed to cover the entire inside of the outline, I just used a toothpick to guide the frosting the rest of the way.  To achieve the marbled effect, I drew designs (leaf veins, in this case) onto the wet yellow base with a toothpick loaded with brown icing.   

It took the cookies about eight hours to dry, but I’ve heard of royal icing taking up to 24 hours.  When the cookies were dry, I arranged them in a leave-behind container and off to the meeting I went.  Delicious!   

Megan Field, Field Notes Guest Author