Piping Sugar Cookies: Simple Writing

The Valentine's Day rush is over which means the blogging can begin. Ironically, I think I have more orders next week than I did this past week (over 200 cookies and macarons!).

Writing with icing can be very intimidating. I know that when I first started icing sugar cookies I felt very apprehensive and nervous about ruining my cookies. Here are a few things to note before you begin writing:

1) Map out your wording. If needed, trace the cookie cutter you used on a piece of paper and map out where your letters will be placed.

2) If you're writing for the first time, make sure that your cookie's base ice is fully dry (otherwise if you make a mistake, it's a little bit more difficult to reverse). 

3) Make sure you have a really thin piping tip and super thick piping icing. Nothing is worse than having your letters run into one another so add more than enough icing sugar and you will come out with the perfect writing icing. 

Now we can begin!

This was a cookie design requested by a super sweet girlfriend. She wanted a blue and black swirled designed Valentine's Day heart cookie (reminiscent of another cookie creation I made back in July) with a simple message. These types of orders are super common so I have gotten pretty good at mapping out names. 

I base iced my cookie with a wet on wet swirling technique. After the icing was fully dry (overnight) I whipped up some super thick icing. A sweet tip: when filling your piping bag, make sure to twist the end while you're filling it so that your icing doesn't come out the other end as directed below: 

I use a fairly thin tip, but you don't want to go too thin as it makes it nearly impossible for the icing to come out when the icing is thick. 

If you would like your lettering to be centred on your cookie, determine the 'centre' of your words. If you word has an even number of letters, then imagine there is a space in between the letters (as shown below). If your word has an odd number of letters, use the centre letter as your anchor. Notice how the tip of the heart is used as the anchor for my lettering:

Make sure that your lettering isn't too large. It is super easy to fill in the gaps with little designs and sugars, but it is quite difficult to make room. 

After I finished the lettering on this particular cookie I found that there were a few gaps and spaces. On the name 'Satpal', there seemed to still be a little bit of a space at the end so I decided to add some hearts. Once I added that heart, I decided to add more to give it a cute and whimsical feel. This is the final product that I came up with:

If you mess up the first few times, don't worry! There are ways to fix it (I will show you in a future post how to fix your cookie mistakes!)

Beautiful Baking Sweeties!