To go with the theme, I thought that iced sugar cookies would be perfect, and I always wanted to personalise it by using Ethan and Harley's first letters of their names and the No. 1 for their first birthday.
Iced Sugar Cookies
I started off by making the sugar cookie dough.
I used the cookie recipe as follows:
Sugar Cookie Dough
Roll into a ball
Cling wrap and put in the fridge to harden
After about an hour or 2, I rolled the dough between 2 pieces of baking paper and cut out the biscuits with my cookie cutters. I bought the nautical cookie cutters off Ebay, and the E, H and 1 from my local cake shop.
Cutting E, H and 1 cookies
E, H and 1 cookies ready to bake
Cutting the nautical themed cookies
Nautical cookies ready to bake
I baked them at 180 degrees for about 12 minutes.
Baked E, H and 1 cookies
Baked Nautical Themed cookies
It was pretty easy to cut the cookies, but the nautical themed ones were a bit fiddly with the smaller parts of the cookie shapes - like the anchor and the wheel shapes.
The next day I iced the cookies.
I used a ready to go pre-mixed Royal Icing mixture. I have made Royal Icing the normal way before using egg whites, but I didn't want to be left with heaps of leftover egg yolks, so bought this mixture instead! For a 500gm mixture you just need to mix in 75ml of water.
I mixed the mixture up in my Kitchenaid (the instructions say not to use a food processer, so I figured a Thermomix was in that category!), and split the mixture into 3. One to keep white, and the other 2 to colour with blue and red gel food colourings. Gel colours make the colours more vibrant than the liquid ones and you use a tiny bit so it doesn't affect the texture of the icing.
Royal Icing ready to colour
White, Blue and Red Royal Icing
Once mixed, I spooned them into disposable piping bags sitting inside large glass cups. I used disposable ones as I only have 1 small frosting tip so I didn't want to have to keep interchanging and washing it between the colours.
Spoon icing into piping bags
Once the icing is all in the piping bags, snip a small hole at the end, and start by outlining the cookies, then filling them in. The royal icing mixture should spread out and give a smooth surface.
Outline cookies with icing
Fill in cookies with icing
Depending on the shape, once adding a base colour, I iced further patterns etc on top layering on the colours.
Nautical Themed Sugar Cookies
These are just a few of the cookies, I still have 1 more batch to go - it is super fiddly and does take some time but it is certainly worth the effort!!
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