HUMMINGBIRD COOKIES

I did some decorated hummingbird cookies when I worked on all my tropical themed cookies a couple of weeks ago...but I was never really satisfied with them.  We are on Spring Break now...no deadlines, no alarm clocks...but also no beach.  When you live near South Padre Island, you avoid the beach like the plague during Spring Break (well, if you are an adult of a certain age anyway).  I decided I would take today and work on trying to improve my cookie decorating skills...I baked just one kind of cookie...just one shape...and I made myself do them over and over again.  I made the dough and baked the cookies on Saturday...and Sunday I spent 4 hours (5 if you include clean up) decorating 28 hummingbird sugar cookies.  There were 30...but 2 met an unfortunate end...so they had to be eaten.  That's okay - quality control is important!

The first dozen, including the royal icing, colorings, and set up, took me 3 hours to finish decorating  and the last 16 took me just over an hour... I was in the swing of things by then.  What I learned is that I am not a great artist, I am inconsistent, but I do improve over time.  Most of my issues were with icing consistency.  I, again, used the squeeze bottles but found I needed a piping bag with a #1 or #2 tip for the best feathering.  Once I got that down, I had more consistency...unfortunately, it took me so long to get to that point that my icing started separating and I ended up with some dry bits gumming up the works...and all the kinds of mishaps that occur when you work with royal icing for many hours straight.



The first dozen - not very consistent

I used my favorite World's Best Sugar Cookies dough and the royal icing found on that link.  I actually looked at cookie after cookie on google images, different websites, and on Etsy.  I settled on what I thought I could do and hoped for an improvement over my sort-of-plain hummers of the previous decorating exercise.  I wanted the feathering to make the wings look more like wings...I guess it did to a certain degree...but again and again...I was not able to make the same pattern consistently.

I'm not totally happy...but I'm getting better. 

So, here's the old one I did last time...and the new ones are, obviously, the blue hummingbirds...I tried to get a little artsy and the feathering didn't work all that well about half the time.  Baby steps...we're taking baby steps!

The ones I did last time

The 2nd dozen - better!

I really like doing this for pleasure...I do not think I'd like doing this for a job!  It's kind of hard work ;-p

Bon Appetit, Y'all!