The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.  She specifically wanted people to decorate their cookies with the theme “September,” whatever that means to you.

Well, September doesn’t really have a special meaning to me… although it is the four-year-old’s birth month, I had already made cookies for him, so I wanted to do something new.  I went with something pretty cliché for the theme and then added something fun that doesn’t really have anything to do with September.

For September, here’s what I came up with:

the standard fall leaves

slightly less common: fall hearts

That’s supposed to say “Sept.”

And my favorite:

SQUIRREL!

I was kind of proud of the way I made his belly look like fur.  And the sugar on the tail.  Secret confession: I think I had this cookie cutter from a make-your-own-dog-biscuits set.

So, once I had the September thing down, I went crazy with the cookies I really wanted to make, but that I couldn’t figure out how to link to September.

STAR WARS COOKIES!  Remember these:

The cookie cutters are “press” cutters, so that they cut the shape and imprint the faces on the dough.  So you get something like this:

cookies pre-frosting

Now, here’s where I’m going to call bullshit on the Williams Sonoma people.  These cutters are way, way cute, but there is one MAJOR problem with the leap from these cookies to the decorated ones on their site.

It is nearly impossible to make them.

Here’s the deal.  What you really need to do with a cookie is outline it, “flood” it with icing in the center to get a background color, and then pipe the details on top.  But if you flood the cookie, you can no longer see the design for the face, so how can you decorate it?  I tell you, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and figuring I was a moron for not being able to figure it out.  If there is a simple answer, peeps, and you know it, please tell me in the comments!

So, I tried two different techniques.  First, I actually did all the detailing and then tried to fill in the background around it.  That was ridiculously hard, and they didn’t even look that good.  Plus, it took me about twenty-five minutes to decorate ONE cookie.  Then I tried flooding and doing the design on top, which basically meant I had to do the design free-hand and so WHY do I even need the press imprint on my cookie?

Here’s what I got.

left: details then background; right: flooding then free-hand details

Neither of these looks like their stormtrooper.  Blast you, Williams Sonoma, how did you do it??!?

I did like my Yoda, which was mostly free-hand details just looking at the photos on the WS site.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Darth Vader was a disaster.  First, how do you pipe details on a black cookie?  They used gray, but the last thing I was going to do was mix up ANOTHER color of frosting.  I already had these:

You can see I even ran out of pastry bags and resorted to Ziplocks.  But I wasn’t going to make another color.  So I used white.

We will now discuss the location of your hidden rebel base.

I did the same experiment with the Vaders, using the two decorating techniques:

left: flooding then free-hand; right: details then background

It seems to me that the free-hand detailing looks better, but it seems such a waste to hide all the imprinted details under the flooding.

Also, you’ll notice that the color on this last photo looks significantly worse– that’s because it took me SO LONG to do these cookies, the sun went down and I didn’t have any more natural light by which to photograph by the end.

SO, my conclusion about the Star Wars cutters?  They are not meant to be used with frosting.  They are super cute without, so I’m not even going to bother frosting them when I make them again.

Happy September!  Here comes October, so beware…

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