Christmas cookies

I imagine this will be the first of multiple Christmas-themed posts. Our pastry chef found the Elf and Santa ornaments at Williams-Sonoma and brought them in to see how they baked up. They're definitely cute, but boy-howdy do they take some time to decorate.

Santa here consisted of multiple steps. I had to outline the different parts in the different colors, but couldn't do all the outlining at once, lest the colors bleed into each other, so that took some time. And then there was the experiment of creating that arm holding the bag out of icing. I had to let the red fill of his coat dry, then do a chunky line for the first part of the arm. Then I had to let THAT dry before adding the forearm. And then THAT dry before tacking on the hand holding the bag. So, this one definitely won't be a regular in our rotation. Not cost-effective. But he's available for special order!

Then we have his elf who was only slightly less time-consuming. And that darn face. I couldn't figure out a way to make it look any less cartoon-y. But still, available for order if he floats your boat!

And then we have the ornaments. Oh, how I love the ornaments. They fall just below snowflakes as my favorite. There's just SO much you can do with them.

For example, I had a woman order 30 of these with a sugar sheet on top to where they were turned into invitations to her Christmas party. And all the info was right there on the cookie. I'll definitely have to see if I can find one of the sample cookies I did and take a photo.

These are so fun. One of my bosses ordered a stencil that you just lay over the (dry) iced cookies, and you just swipe some buttercream over it. Lift it off and...ta da! The unfortunate part is that our bakery's awesome Italian meringue buttercream doesn't crust over like some other buttercreams. So if I want to do this in the future, I'll have to whip up a special batch of the kind that gets hard after awhile (American buttercream, made with shortening, if I'm not mistaken) to make them shelf-stable. Otherwise, they smudge waaaay too easily (see on the right hand cookie down near the bottom?).

And I tried to sub in some white royal icing rather than buttercream....yeah, not so much. It comes out a lot messier and less pretty.