Dia de los Muertos sugar skull cookies

Over the last two weeks we've been experimenting with making sugar skull cookies.  I'm a novice when it comes to royal icing and elaborately decorated cookies.  But after spotting some nifty cookie cutters with embossed sugar skull designs, we had to give it a try.

I ran across a new recipe for sugar cookies, which I made.  Super easy since it does not require that you chill the dough before rolling out and cutting the cookies.  The link takes you to the recipe, and my preference is to use one teaspoon vanilla extract and one teaspoon almond extract.  Here in Seattle I needed all the flour and maybe even a bit more.  But I found that I could add in more as needed as I rolled them out.

I baked the cookies last night and flooded most of them with white royal icing when they were cool so they would be ready to decorate today.  Mixing lots of colors of icing and filling bags and locating tips was a lot of work last week.  So my idea this week was to skip the piped colored icing altogether and to give food decorating pens a try.  I picked up a set of 10 colored pens at Home Cake in North Seattle. (The woman who runs the shop is an outstanding resource for materials, equipment and tips for pretty much any cake or cookie related project.)  I also came home with some fun edible embellishments for the cookies.

Somehow I neglected to take any photos last week when our friends Will and Carrie joined us to make and decorate the first round of cookies (and wrestle).  But today I remembered!  This week we invited a couple co-op friends to come help us with the decorating.  Again, we had a lot of wrestling.  Not so much between the moms, but the two-year-olds definitely got into it.  The cookies were pretty fun too, and the pens made serious decorating much more accessible to the boys.

I think the moms had just as much (if not more) fun with the cookies.  Decorating the cookies; choosing colors and materials and making up a design.  I enjoyed the drawing and coloring and generally using the creative side of my brain more than I expected. And this was made even better because I got to do it while talking about life with two interesting women.  I'm thinking this may become a new tradition.