Enagement Ring Cookies!!

I thought of this all by myself! I like to get creative with my desserts and hadn't made cookies in a while and I had never used royal icing before so I thought I would try it out. The icing isn't hard to make at all, but it did give me some issues...ha ha.

As you know, one of my goals for 2013 is to make one recipe from each of my cookbooks. Barrett's mom gave me a cookie cookbook (from Kohl's but can't find it online) a while ago and after flipping through it I decided on the Shortbread Butter cookie recipe. I used my large circle cookie cutter and my small circle cookie cutter to make the ring part. The diamond was made from the inside of the ring (the small cookie cutter) that I then made into a hexagon and smushed together with the ring part. I also used a small heart cookie cutter to make smaller un-iced cookies.

I decided to stick with white icing for the major color of the cookie. I poured most of it into a disposable pastry bag and snipped a tiny bit of the bag off at the end. I then piped the outside and inside borders. Once they were hard, I tried cutting a bigger hole in my bag so that the icing would flow out and would settle within it's borders. Yeah that didn't happen. I think my icing may have gotten too thick for that. So after ruining one cookie, I squeezed the rest of the icing back into the bowl and used a butter knife to spread the icing on. The borders did help some with this part. Since I still had some icing left, I decided to color it the lightest blue I could and outline the diamonds. Some turned out better than others.

While I was making these, Barrett (who knew I was making ring cookies) thought they looked like the boy/girl sex symbols...ha ha. Also, according to my brother if you just quickly glanced at them they looked like pacifiers. But most people saw them as rings.

They aren't too bad for my first time with both the dough and the icing, but I think I might stick to cupcakes for a while...ha ha.