Cookies for a Sunday afternoon

For centuries art students have studied the masters. In a time before photography, art students would set up easels in galleries and copy the colour choices and brush strokes of really great artists. As long as you don't try to pass off this copy as your own work, we don't see the harm. It's a learning process.  Concentrate on the technique by not having to worry about composition or colour. Master the technique and then go on to pursue your own vision in the new medium.

Today, we want to document our own learning process. And the medium du jour is cookies! Remember art is everywhere.

We've been stalking a new-to-us cookie blog called Sweetopia and if you're at all interested in cookies, you should check out her blog. Go ahead. We'll wait........... Right. You're back.

There are about a million ways to decorate a cookie and one of the first that caught our eye was what Marian (from Sweetopia) calls a 'runout'. So cool! Seriously! It's a design made of royal icing piped onto parchment paper. Once it's dried, you can pick it up and set it on top of a cookie.

Like one of those art students, we set out to master this technique by totally copying Marian's project. I don't think Marian has to worry. We're clearly no threat because we made a ton of mistakes but we learned lots, too. For instance, when we went back to look at Marian's tutorial, we noticed that she had made a runout that fit on a cake top. Hmmmmm....perhaps that's why we had a wee bit of trouble making ours cookie-sized. :) Next time, we'll go with a simpler design.



Runout on parchment paper

This time we made Brown Sugar Oatmeal Cookies. It's a recipe we got years ago from Canadian Living Magazine (we think). You don't roll this dough. Just pat it into shape. We drew a rectangle on the back of the parchment paper and patted the dough out to cover. Bake and then slice while still warm. Because the snowmen are sorta large, the rectangles had to be big, too. Each cookie is a whopping 2.75 inches x 3.25 inches. Now, that's a cookie! We wrapped them up as party favours.

We really like how they turned out and we have big plans for more cookies to come. If you'd like to know the fine points of how this is done, head on over to Sweetopia.net to get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. You don't want to learn from amateurs. You want to learn from the masters, too.