Learning to flood biscuits...the hard way!

Chocolate Chip Delights

So I said I was going to make some chocolate chip cookies and I did! I used a recipe from a magazine I picked up that adapts a sugar biscuit recipe. These cookies are so ideal for decorating as they are flat and taste great! I wanted to practice flooding this time using royal icing. This is where you use icing to create a hard outline and wait for it dry. Then you thin the icing down with water and fill in the area which you have outlined. It gives a lovely even and shiny finish!

  Planning Ahead 

I decided I best plan ahead and think up some designs for my biscuits first, so I know what colours I  needed to make my chosen designs. I tried to think up designs that were more child orientated and less "girly" like my last biscuits. I want to challenge myself so I thought I would jump in at the deep end. I had varying levels of success!

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

 

Flooding the base layer of the biscuits was easy enough, but it took about 2 hours to dry! I found out that I need to work on my piping skills, as the lines around the biscuits were a bit wobbly! The real difficulties came when adding more icing and flooding on top of these base layers. On a couple of biscuits I put too much icing in the area where I wanted to flood and the icing went over the outlines I had made! But now I know not too add too much icing. 

I had a lot of problems making black icing as you have to add a lot of food colouring to get a really dark black to white icing. In the end my icing turned too runny and my mickey and minnie designs didnt turn out very well! I was pleased with the cartoon 'bang' designs though!

The whole process made me really understand how to flood biscuits, the limitations of it and the advantages of it. In the future I will probably stick to using three colours as there is too many nozzles and piping bags to change otherwise! Also I would probably stick to simpler designs to being with, using different designed cookie cutters and then piping one design on top in thick icing. :)