Dance Costume Cookies

My 4 year old just wrapped up her first year of dance.  As a celebration I made cookies for her teacher and for all the members of her dance class.   I purchased a tutu cookie cutter with plans to make a little pink ballet tutu.  But before long I realized it was just as easy, and a lot more fun, to make it look like her adorable "Buttered Popcorn" dance costume.

I used my favorite cookie recipe and icing recipe, see this blog post:

Haunted Cookies

A little tip, when I make the royal icing I always add less water then it calls for.   Then I add the water a little at a time until I get the right consistency.  If you are flooding you will want to add more water then the recipe calls for.  But be careful not to add too much.   Too much water will make the icing dry dull and make it runny while working with it.

So of course it started with the dough and I used these cookie cutters: Dance Cookie Cutters from Ann Clark

To make these gorgeous cookies I first made yellow royal icing.  I now use the Wilton Color Right Food Coloring system to make the best colors.   For this I used 2 drops of yellow.   I separated out some of the yellow icing and added water for a flooding consistency.   

I have never really gotten how to flood a cookie well.  It has remained a struggle.  So this time I used Writer Bottles.  Writer Bottles I actually did not purchase these for this purpose.  I bought them to make fancy pancakes and they are a bit to small for that.  But turns out they are perfect for flooding cookies with Royal Icing.  I use a toothpick to fill in the icing into the gaps.  These were definitely my best flooding results yet.   Then I made a gray icing to food the top of the dress.    Because I was using sparkles on the top I made sure not to flood the grey part until the yellow was completely dry.  I think it was also really important that I do the yellow first.  

As soon as I flooded the gray I sprinkled them with Wilton Silver Pearlized Sprinkles and the result was a perfect sparkly gray top.  

Here they are flooded with no details.  

My mom actually thought the cookies were done at this point.  I suppose they could have been, but details make the cookie, so next I added the dress details. Using a thin circle tip #2 I piped lines onto the tutu to give it some definition.   While piping the dress lines I realized something,  that the tutu of the costume was sparkling.   I didn't want to add glitter to the whole cookie, it would have been to much, so to capture this idea I waited for the dress lines to dry and then added a little more yellow icing at the bottom and carefully sprinkled the sparkles onto it.   The easiest way to do add sparkles to the bottom only was to hold the cookie upright in the bowl of sparkles, and then I pushed the sparkles onto the wet icing on the bottom of the dresses.  

Then using a #16 star tip I created a sash and then using a small petal tip I made a bow.  I ran into a little trouble at this point as the kitchen was hot and my icing was getting a bit too soft.  To combat it I added sifted confectioners sugar into my icing a little at a time.  Once the bow was done, and dry, I topped each bow with a small dot of yellow icing and sprinkled it with the sparkling sugar to add that little bit of "bling" that is on the bow of the costume.   

I think they really captured the look of the dress.   The dress is a halter top but I was limited by cookie cutter availability.  But despite the differnces this was just supposed to be a representation of the dress and everyone, especially the girls, thought they looked like the dress, so the result was exactly what I hoped for.  

My daughter exclaimed in delight "I'm going to eat my dress."  Mission accomplished.

You tell me??  Does this look like the dress?