The Infamous Panties Cookies

My good friend A is getting married next month. Last weekend we made the trek to Savannah, GA for her bachelorette weekend. As part of the "too-much-fun" festivities, we had a lingerie shower. As soon as we planned the shower, I knew I wanted to make the "Panties Cookies."

While I love to cook, baking is not always my forte. I struggle when it comes to confections sometimes, so I was a bit apprehensive about this project. I was also very excited to make these cookies, which have been book-marked on my computer for months. Adding to the perfect storm of frustration was the fact that I waited until the night before to make them, had never made Royal Icing before, only have a hand mixer, only had one icing bag, and I had about a million other things to get done that night too.

So let's begin. To save some time, I used box mix sugar cookies. Normally, I advocate home-made, but I just didn't have the time. Otherwise, I would have most certainly used The Most Fabulous Sugar Cookie Recipe, courtesy of Katie.

To make the bra and panties, all you need is a heart-shaped cookie cutter. To do the tops, you just cut out a heart and flip it upside down. To do the bottoms, cut out a heart, then slice off the pointed end and flip upside down. Et voila: tits and 'tocks! I baked the cookies and cooled them the night before.

For tips on Royal Icing, I once again turned to Katie, who is a genius at stuff like this. Her blog post was filled with all sorts of detailed instructions. I would like to add that if you haven't worked with Royal Icing before, do a test run before you're working on the big project. I had no idea what consistency it was really supposed to be. And this led to a lot of frustrated tears and pouting and a few declarations of defeat.

To get the icing to a pipable and mixable consistency, I added about 1 tsp extra of water to each little dish before mixing in the color. Otherwise, it's way too stiff and impossible to mix or squeeze onto a cookie.

Once the consistency was right, this was surprisingly easy. (A test run would have saved me a lot of headache.) And a little icing goes a LOOOOOOONG way. These little dishes covered about 8 sets of cookies each with extra to spare. I made extra icing in case I needed it and I threw away a lot (almost half).

In the end, the cookies were a success...no one wanted to eat them because they were too cute. But I assured everyone that I had taken plenty of pictures and I had no desire to ever see these little suckers again, so please, eat up!

Congrats to A and J, who will tie the knot in about 5 weeks. I can't wait!