At the time of this writing, we are closing out the year with SO much excitement for what’s ahead! It felt like the perfect time to let these Adventure Awaits cookies inspire us! And what I love most about this cookie set is that they are EASY! I actually recommend designs like this for beginners and I’ll explain more below! Regardless of the new chapter you or the recipient is facing, these cookies are sure to give the nudge of motivation needed to crush it! Let’s dive in!
Recipes
First things first, recipes! When designing this set, I opted to go with our lemon cutout cookie recipe and not only because of the yellow. For cookies designed to inspire or motivate, lemon felt like the right choice for its crisp flavor and energy. Our lemon sugar cookie recipe, which you can find HERE is flavor perfection. And since it’s no-chill and no-spread, it’s easy-peasy lemon squeezy…pun intended!
For the icing, we went with our go-to vanilla royal icing recipe, which complements the lemon flavor perfectly!
Cookie Design
For this set, I really wanted to have free flowing, abstract designs, so chose to use some basic shapes and plaques. Lately, I am finding myself reaching for my plaque cookie cutters with almost every set! I think they add such nice character to complement a set without having to be a true shape. I love THIS set of plaque cookie cutters. In addition to the plaques in this set, you also get a hexagon, square and rectangle, which I use ALL the time.
For colors, I used ChefMaster lemon yellow for both shades. We buy THIS gel color set on repeat and love it.
Technique
Like I shared earlier, I wanted this set to be really free flowing and creative. This is precisely the reason why I highly recommend sets like this for beginners. See, when you’re first learning to decorate sugar cookies, a lot of your experience comes from playing with royal icing. When you play with it in a set like this, there are no rules. It doesn’t need to BE anything, so it’s not disappointing when your unicorn comes out looking like a janky donkey!
I chose to use wet-on-wet decorating techniques in every cookie in this set. Experimenting with wet-on-wet, pulling and pushing the icing, teaches you a lot about how it behaves. You also get great outlining and flooding experience with designs like this.
When I sat down, I didn’t really know exactly what I was going to do. So I did sketch on the cookies with an edible marker to give myself a general guideline of design ideas. You may work better with a blank canvas! But a mix of shapes, borders, lines and free design give you TONS of experience and you will learn a lot through this experience!
Now whether or not you want to add lettering, is totally up to you. These phrases just screamed to me when I think about an exciting year ahead. I used the Autography font from Dafont, which you can find HERE. But you may want to check out THIS post highlighting 10 of my favorite, go-to fonts for cookie decorating! Using my projector and stand that I can’t live without, I added the inspirational phrases to top off this set of Adventure Awaits cookies.
What Adventure is Awaiting you?
I can tell you that if you are new to cookie decorating, there is a BIG adventuring awaiting you! I hope this set inspires you to try an abstract, free flowing and creative cookie set. I promise you will learn so much from the experience. And you can then give or sell them to someone else embarking on a new adventure!
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