Last year just before Easter, my grandmother sent me a nice package of copper cookie cutters, decorating sugar, and icing, from Williams-Sonoma. Honestly, I hadn’t made sugar cookies and iced them since I was a kid. I made some cookies and mixed up some frosting and then we decorated them. It was a lot of fun! It was a little difficult keeping the icing liquid, as it is hard in a tube and you have to warm it up in hot water to squeeze it out, and of course the hardest part to liquify is at the opening. We managed to make some cute cookies, though.

Here is our first batch, from March 2009:

Maddy loves frosting!

Our second batch, April 2009:

using our heart cookie cutter, not part of the set

Inspired by the fun times making these cookies, Maddy and I found some other cookie cutters. This is a set with a flower, a petal, and a bee/butterfly shape.

I decided to try natural food colorings, and dyed the yellow frosting with a tiny bit of turmeric and flavored it with a little lemon oil. We could not taste the turmeric at all. I used cocoa powder for the brown, and simmered down some berries and mixed the juice into the frosting for the pink. It made it a little runnier than the others, but it still dried OK. It was delicious! The natural flavorings from the cocoa and berries were wonderful added bonuses. I will definitely try some other colors in the future. I really want to try green with spirulina, and maybe peppermint oil to mask that flavor.