Butter Cookies and Writing with Icing

It's not very often that I am called to 'write' with icing and I admit I'm not particuarly good at it, but I will have a go.  Here are a couple of cakes I've made and written on this year.

I practised on a spare bit of fondant for this cake I made for my Mum.

And it was this cake which attracted the attention of Cake Decorating Store who kindly offered me the opportunity to choose a product from their website to review here at Farmersgirl Kitchen.

I chose this Wilton's Make-Any-Message letterpress set as I thought it would be helpful when I have another icing writing project to complete. There is also a Wilton Easy Pipe Script Message Set but I wanted to have the flexibility of making my own messages. The Letterpress is easy to use, you do need to trim the letter pieces after separating them or they don't fit into the slide bar. 

 

I made a simple Butter Cookie recipe which makes a nice firm cookie for cutting and shaping.  I also had the chance to try out my Salter Heston Blumenthal Precision Rolling Pin as the dough was to be 1/8 in or 3mm thick and it worked brilliantly giving me a nice even dough.  The letters are quite large and only in upper case so I had to choose short words for a my cookies.  A cake would give more opportunities for longer words!

Here are the baked EAT cookies, which would work perfectly well without the icing as well as being a really easy guide for piping the letters, giving a nice even size.

Butter Cookies
2 1/2 cups (350g) plain flour
1 1/2 sticks (180g) butter, cubed
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup (140g) icing sugar
1 tbsp lemon zest
1 egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Using a stand mixer with paddle (K) attachment or food processor with dough blade, mix together the flour, butter, salt, icing sugar and lemon zest until crumbs form.
2. Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix for 1 minute until all the ingredients are combined and dough forms.
3. Cover the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.
4. Preheat oven to 180C (350F).  Wokring on a lightly floured surfcace, roll out dough to a thickness of about 1/8 in/3mm.  Using any cookie fo your choice, cut out rounds of the dough and transfer to abaking sheet lined with parchment paper, spacing 2 ins apart.
5. Bake for 22-25 minutes.  Transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely.
6. Cookies can be stored for up to a week in an airtight container at room termperature.

I also tried the letterpress on some circles of fondant and iced over the letters.  As you see I had more success with HIM, but that was really down to not having cut the end of the piping bag properly as I piped HER first, then trimmed the piping bag and it worked better after that. Again, I think the ability to get the letters so even makes a much more professional finish. 

I made some other toppings for the cookies with some of icing that had been left over from the train cake.  I've had the Gerbera/Sunflower stamp for a while and not used it much, I see that it is also available on the Cake Decorating Store website, along with pretty much everything else you might need to ice and decorate cakes, cupcakes and cakepops.

Many thanks to Cake Decorating Store for the opportunity to review the Wilton Make a Message Letterpress, I was not paid for this review and all opinions are my own.