Sunflower Cookies

Sunflower Cookies by the hundreds! I made these for my friend's wedding and at first, I had trouble finding a Sunflower Cookie Cutter. However, there was one in my Wilton 101 Piece Cookie Cutter Set all along! I just didn't realize it, because it had so many petals. I ended up piping out all the petals using Wilton tip #30 and the sunflower cookies turned out to be quite pretty. Next time, I would probably try harder to find a cookie cutter with only 6 to 8 petals as it would have saved a lot of time.

I was hoping to make Sunflower Cupcakes to go with the sunflower cookies, but did not have enough time. I'll have to try making the sunflower cupcakes for another occasion. I probably wouldn't have had enough counter space for everything either! I had to put a lot of the cookies on my kitchen table to dry overnight.

At first I thought that the cookie on the left looked nice and rustic, but decided that the brighter sunflower on the right would be nicer. The sunflower cookie on the left was my first attempt at mixing the yellow shade that I thought would look best. However, it had a little too much copper in it. In my opinion, both look nice. The shade you would want to go with just depends on what you prefer. The final mixture of icing (pictured on the right) contained 1 part copper, 3 parts lemon yellow and 1 part daffodil yellow. To get the color on the left, I used 2 parts copper, 2 parts lemon yellow and 1 part daffodil yellow.

I used this sugar cookie recipe, 

Sugar Cookies

and this royal icing recipe,

Royal Icing

For the petal icing, I had to add extra icing sugar to stiffen the royal icing so that the lines on the petals would not run. I added one extra cup of icing sugar to start and then gradually added a little more until it was stiff enough to stay on the paddle attachment of my mixer when lifted out of the bowl. I had to be careful not to make it too dry and stiff. The icing should still be shiny, and if it gets too dry, just keep adding half teaspoons of water until it gets smooth and shiny again.