Use It Up

This post is once again not about cupcakes. I'll try not to make this the norm, but I haven't been baking cupcakes as much as I've been baking everything else under the sun. This week my boys and I cut out heart cookies out of store-bought gingerbread dough and decorated them with royal icing for Valentine's Day. This was my first time using royal icing. It's fun.

Royal icing is the kind used on cookies because it dries hard allowing you to stack and pack cookies without smudging. There are at least two ways you can make this kind of icing. You can use egg whites or meringue powder (for those of us that are a little nervous about raw eggs). Here is Martha's recipe.

We had a bunch of icing left over even though the boys piled mountains of it on top of their cookies. I decided to make some frosted oatmeal raisin cookies for my husband. Oatmeal cookies are one of his favorites; I think, in part, because the oats give the cookies a little more nutrition than other cookies. On that note, I recently learned that rolled oats are more nutritious than quick oats (I guess that's pretty logical, like whole wheat flour has more nutrition than white flour - less processed). Anyway, unless the recipes you use call for quick oats, I recommend using rolled oats instead. If you have a store near you that sells grains in bulk, they are usually 99 cents a pound, and sometimes on sale for less.

I actually used quick oats for this batch of cookies as I had a container full that I needed to use up. As it happens, the whole reason I made the cookies was to use up the royal icing. If you couldn't tell already, I love using things up. I get a lot of satisfaction out of using up ingredients and leftovers; and using up two things at once in a recipe is even more satisfying. Without further ado, here at last is a pic of my oatmeal raisin cookies, drizzled with royal icing.

I used a basic oatmeal cookie recipe from BHG with my own tweaks. Click here for the recipe on the BHG site. I scoop them with a 1/4 cup measuring scoop to make big cookies. I like big cookies because you don't have to keep going back to the cookie jar... and you get through baking your dough quicker. I love that! If you scoop them big, they will take 12 to 14 minutes to cook.