St. Patrick's Day is almost upon us! I like that it's not super close to Easter this year...more time for more cookies.
The luck of the Irish was not with me in the decorating department. I'll start by saying that these are not my most favorite St. Patrick's Day cookies. These are.
I tried LilaLoa's method of using one consistency of icing for the outlining and filling. Let's just say that I need a bit more practice getting that consistency perfected.
I do like the shamrocks leaves split down the middle. I'll show you how I did that. There was supposed to be a large horseshoe with a bow that was SO CUTE in my head and SO AWFUL in actuality. Just keeping things real here...not every cookie is a winner. (The good news is, they still taste fantastic!)
FIRST, though, since these are St. Patrick's Day cookies, I made the cookies using Kerrygold Irish Butter. I LOVE Kerrygold for spreading on bread, or well, anything. I was curious how it would taste in my usual cookie recipe. I couldn't taste a discernable difference (I'll have to do a side-by-side someday), but my cut-outs were noticeably softer. I'm guessing it's that slightly higher fat content.
To make the shamrocks, I used the one consistency icing (see LilaLoa's post) to outline and fill one half of each leaf. I let that set for a bit...about 15 minutes...and then did the same with the other half. (For the shade, I mixed leaf green and forest green food coloring. It darkened (and dulled, unfortunately) when dry.
On some of the shamrocks, I added a light green detail on the top in this same consistency icing.
For the horseshoes, I used gold-tinted (pale yellow) icing. Once dry, I mixed some gold luster dust with Everclear and painted the mixture on for the metallic gold finish. Everclear does evaporate quickly, so if you're doing a lot of gold work, know that you'll have to keep adding a bit of Everclear as it thickens.
What are you making for St. Patrick's Day?