Merry Christmas! In reference to the Nutcracker ballet, a classic family tradition, today I decided to make these cute and delicious Ballerina Sugar Cookies with Royal icing. This combines two of my passions together, ballet and baking! For those of you who don't know, I've been dancing for the past 18 years and run a dance blog called 'Dance News BC'. So, for anyone whose also a fan of dance in general, feel free to check it out at dancenewsbc.com for information on dance related news, product reviews, and inspiration. As for the cookies, my dad recently bought me some ballet cookie cutters, namely in the shape of a ballerina, pointe shoe, and tutu. After doing a bit of research, I decided to make sugar cookies with royal icing, which is surprisingly the first time I've actually tried out this combination. In the past when I've made sugar cookies, the recipe never turned out well, but fortunately this one was just perfect and was both thin enough to bit into, as well as thick enough to not crumble upon picking it up.
In terms of modifications, there weren't many I needed to make for the cookies themselves. A few that I did end up doing include using 1/2 tsp of almond extract and cooling the cookies in the fridge for 1hr rather than 2 hrs (I was a bit impatient haha). I also ended up needing to add a bit of flour, as I found the dough too sticky. I would also recommend not rolling out the dough too much. Otherwise, the cookies will break off in more intricate templates such as the ballerina one I made down below. The cookies took about 15 minutes in the oven at 350F and the recipe made 30 cookies in total. However, this is largely dependent upon the size of the cookie cutters you use and how thin you roll out the dough.
I then let the cookies cool for about 15 minutes before icing. This is important, otherwise the thinner sections of the cookies may break apart when lifting them off of the pan. As for the icing, I was pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was to make. However, a few alterations I made include adding about 1-2tbsps more of icing sugar, as I found the icing a bit thin, as well as dyeing the icing pink using gel food colouring. Gel food colouring is much better than liquid food colouring, as the latter will often cause the icing to become thinner or have more of an aftertaste. Whereas, the former allows you space to deepen the colour for a richer appearance without affecting the texture or taste. In terms of icing, rather than using a piping bag, I used this icing squeeze tip that I bought at Homesense. This was perfect, as it's reusable, easy to use, and you can easily change out the piping tip sizes and colours of icing by cleaning it between each use. The piping tip size I used for the outlining of the finer details was a Wilton #1 round tip such as the ballerina's pointe shoes and ribbons, a #3 round tip for the outlining of the pointe shoe design, and a #5 round tip for the larger areas such as the tutu cookie design.
Icing the cookies was surprisingly easy to do, as I've never iced with royal icing before, but the main tip is to outline the area you want to ice and then fill it or what they call 'flooding' the area inside the outlined area. As fun as this was, it also ended up taking about 2hrs for icing, so make sure you allot enough time and play your favourite music or a movie on at the same time. Trust me, it helps the time pass by a lot faster!
Overall, these cookies turned out really well and I hope you enjoyed this review and have fun baking! Happy holidays :)
Here is the link to the sugar cookies recipe: sallysbakingaddiction.com
Here is the link to the royal icing recipe: sallysbakingaddiction.com
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