Happy Birthday U.S.A.

I've been watching all of the cookie decorators I follow making beautiful patriotic themed cookies in preparation for the 4th of July.  I've never decorated cookies for 4th of July because, in the younger years, we were always at the lake, having a picnic, a cook-out, or ... well, heck, I didn't decorate cookies back then unless they were slice 'n' bake with sprinkles on top.  In recent years, it's too darn hot to decorate cookies in July.  However...this year, I felt the lure of the red, white, and blue royal icing.

So, I got the idea that I wanted to find one of the great chocolate sugar cookies I've seen many of the cookie decorators use.  The colors look particularly nice on the dark background and the thought of a chocolate cookie sounded really nice.  I selected the recipe I found on a favorite baker, LilaLoa's blog.  Here's the link.  It is a very, very tasty cookie...such a nice change from regular sugar cookies (although, I do love vanilla sugar cookies).

My inspiration for the star cut-outs were from
Glorious Treats and Sweet Sugarbelle - two of
my favorite cookie decorators!!!

So, I made a batch of chocolate cookie dough and wrapped it in 4 portions and put it in the fridge.  It was too stinking hot to turn on the oven.  I waited another day.  Still hot - but I decided to roll anyway.  It was unbelievably humid to boot...the rolling process was "challenging" to say the least.  I ended up rolling between parchment paper and putting the cut dough in the freezer, on the parchment paper, before removing them to the cookie sheets.  It's the same sort of texture as the gingerbread cookies I made at Christmas, and I found even a few minutes in the kitchen with a pre-heated oven made this dough horribly sticky.  So, I immediately hopped to the process I used in December...and it worked very well.  Once they were baked off, I let them cool on racks and moved them to a container, separated by wax paper, in the hopes of reduced humidity the next day.  Well... no luck...it poured buckets and was 95% humidity even when it wasn't raining.  So, I waited.

I made the base icing on Saturday night, mixed colors and began decorating on Sunday (wishing desparately that I had a food dehydrator, also recommended by LilaLoa's blog) to ensure appropriate drying of the icing.  Since I didn't have one, and the temperature was more manageable...I used Ann Smith's "turn down the a/c" trick - and everything worked out pretty darn well!

I learned I'm not all that good at piping straight lines...for stripes.  I can NOT pipe a star free hand worth beans.  I can pipe a bunch of dots thanks to my PME 1 and 1.5 tips... and I enjoyed playing with colors to obtain two different shades of blue.  I messed up a few (but the beauty of cookies is you get to eat the mistakes!) and only rolled about a dozen for this project.  Pictures below of how it all came together.

Cut out mostly squares and circles and then cut some stars
from the middle of some circles - I was ready to decorate!

The first set the second morning

The second set after layering on some more detail

I tend to enjoy feathering - and these reminded me of fireworks

Happy 4th of July U.S.A.!

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