Magic Goodies

So my partner plays Magic The Gathering every Friday like clockwork and being the good girlfriend that I am I decided to bake him themed cookies. This particular Friday they had an event on and I didn’t want anyone to loose out so Thursday night I set out to make a hundred sugar cookies from scratch!

 I honestly did think that this would be easy, time consuming but easy. Boy did I have another thing coming! The sugar cookies were easy enough. I’ve made sugar cookies before from Joy of Baking. Joy of Baking is my first choice for recipes because most of the recipes are tested so I know it’ll turn out perfect and mine turned out amazing! I doubled the recipe to get the hundred cookies and I would suggest only baking them for only 10-12 minutes depending on size. Because they are chocolate sugar cookies you cant see them going brown so be very careful not to burn them.

Cookies done and now for the icing; again I used the recipe from The Joy of Baking. I used royal icing because it dries had and therefore easier to transport. I’ve used this recipe before but it was a very long time and never in on such a large scale. First things first, you want the icing at piping consistency. Anything thicker and you’ll need to spatular it on and anything runnier and it’ll just roll off. The best way I found to put the icing on was to pipe on a circle outline and then fill in the circle. If you don’t want the layer of icing to be too thick then put a little bit on spread it with a toothpick. Also remember that the type of food colouring you use will affect the consistency so if you want really vibrant colours I would suggest using gel or powder food colouring.    

Now for the chocolate toppers, I initially got the idea for these from Nerdy Nummies but I wasn’t about to make a hundred cupcakes by myself so I just used the chocolate toppers. In theory this looks easy; you get a template, trace it out with chocolate and leave it to dry. Not quite. This probably goes without saying but tape both the template and the wax paper that you are tracing on down. I melted the chocolate in the piping bag and then snipped a tiny hole. Because the hole needs to be relatively small make sure all the chocolate is melted otherwise it will block the opening. If I had opted for a basic shape maybe this part would have been easier but some of the symbols are tricky so this part took a lot longer than I thought. It also didn’t help that I don’t have a very steady hand so I ended up going to bed at about seven am! Here’s the end result.