Round Butter Cookies With Royal Icing Frosting

Yesterday we baked cake again and, as usual, we ended up with a lot of leftover butter cream frosting. In my previous post, you can still use leftover buttercream icing for other baked recipes. With the leftover icing, I made round butter cookies with royal icing. The recipe of the butter cookies is derived from the shortbread recipe that I used for the checkerboard cookies while the royal icing was intentionally made to add color and design to the cookies.

You can refer to the recipe of the butter cookies from my post about checkerboard cookies but, in any case, I will still post them here to save you the time and trouble of going from one post to the other. 

Ordinary Shortbread Recipe                                         Royal Icing Recipe   

1/3 cup sugar                                                             1 egg    

½ cup leftover buttercream icing                                 1 1/3 cup white sugar                           

1 ½ cup sifted all purpose flour     

To make the butter cookies, combine all ingredients in a bowl. I decided to cut back the sugar since I will be adding sweet frosting to the cookies later. Mix well and place the dough inside a zip lock bag or a ceram wrap to prevent the dough from crumbling. Place it inside the fridge for an hour to set. 

Using a rolling pin, flatten the dough according to the desired thickness. Use a cookie cutter (in my case, I used inverted cup) to make the round shape of cookies. 

Preheat your oven for 180 degrees Celsius and cook the cookie dough for 10 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Once done, take the cookie out and cool them on a rack. In my case, I let them cool while still on the pan as I do not have a cookie rack at home.

While the cookies cooling down to room temperature,  prepare the royal icing. Carefully separate the egg white from the yellow yolk. Be careful not to break the yolk while doing this procedure because the presence of fats (from the yolk) prevents the icing from becoming fluffy. 

Combine the egg white and sugar and beat the mixture using a hand mixer. You will know that the royal icing is ready if it forms steep peaks or if you hold the inverted bowl above your head and the icing does not fall off. 

Once the cookies have cooled down, pipe in the royal icing on top of your cookies and decorate using sprinkles or food dye. I love this part a lot! When piping royal icing, make sure that you use grease-free icing bag because the grease tends to break the icing apart.