Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I had fun trying out a new cookie decorating technique…

I made some mistakes and have a list of improvements to make, but I also have a list of ideas for future decorations swirling around in my head and am eager to practice more!

I happened upon SugarBelle’s blog and used her royal icing recipe for these cookies (Note: After finishing my cookie experiment, I saw a much more recent post from SugarBelle with an updated royal icing recipe and tips here!).

Here are the ingredients ready to begin my royal icing adventure…

The recipe called for mixing up VERY stiff icing to start from for tinting and watering down to desired consistencies for decorating. I think I was pretty successful in this (and my wrist felt it too after mixing in all of the coloring!)

The only two green tint colors I had were these two…

Let the tinting begin! After multiple rounds of adding a couple drops at a time and stirring…

Even if not quite the two green colors I had imagined, I eventually got a decent contrast and figured that was the best I could do with what I had… time to expand my green tint collection!

(I apologize for lack of photos during this process…) I then watered down my ‘pipe consistency’ icing with a spray water bottle, placed it in a piping bag with a #3 tip, and prepared my ‘flood consistency’ icing by watering it down even more, and placed it in a squeeze bottle. Starting simple, below you can see one cookie that has been outlined, and the other that has been outlined and then “flooded’.

And then there were these…. 😀 I went crazy with multiple compositions!

(I’m wishing I had more than four $1 gold coins…. I think it would have made for more of an impactful message ;))

Since I didn’t have anything rainbow to add to the mix, I created one out of Washi tape 🙂

And let (a little too) loose with the edible gold glitter!