Rockstar Cutout Cookies

Last weekend, L and I had the pleasure of attending Abby's first birthday party at O & K's house. L and I try to visit Abby almost every week if we can, and it's been amazing getting to watch her develop into a little girl. She is truly a joy to be around, and I feel very lucky to be a part of L's life and family.

Months ago, K told me about the theme she had in mind for the party, and we began exploring Pinterest to find cute food and decoration ideas. We were excited to find so many great ideas, and K asked me to make a few of the rockstar themed desserts for the party. We settled on microphone cupcakes (cupcakes baked into an ice cream cone) and dark chocolate cut out cookies shaped like stars and vinyl records. Originally, cookies shaped like electric guitars had been the plan, but we were unable to acquire a guitar shaped cookie cutter within the time frame.

Sadly, when I was making the cookie dough, I didn't think to take pictures of my process, so I only have photos of the decorating part.

The recipe I used for the cookies was originally from Martha Stewart and you can go here to see it. Like with any recipe, I did tweak the directions slightly based on trial and error. I would not advise freezing the disks of cookie dough before you cut them into shapes. Otherwise, you will be kneading it for a very long time (sorry, L). I would advise freezing the cookies on the parchment paper before you put them in the oven. The thicker the cookies, the more rich and chocolaty goodness you will taste when you bite into them! They also really taste great when you put some sort of additional chocolate candy on top, such as Reese's peanut butter cups.

 

Once the cookies were baked, I made Royal Icing to decorate them with. Royal Icing is meant for cut out cookies because the consistency can be manipulated easily and its not as fluffy and creamy as cake frosting. You can find a ton of different recipes on how to make it, but basically all you need is powdered sugar, meringue powder, and water. Here is the Wilton recipe I normally use. Once you have the consistency you are looking for, you can change the colors using Wilton Icing Gel. You don't want to use normal food coloring because it will thin your icing. Plus, the gel colors achieve deeper and darker colors without wasting as much of it. The color I used was rose pink, since the theme colors were pink and grey.

I used the pink to decorate the stars and be the centers for the vinyl disks!

Once the pink icing was dry, I added some black icing to make the vinyl records. They turned out great!

Here is the display at the party with the cookies! Yum!