Put a little fall in your mouth

I made these cookies about 2 weeks ago now and put a little teaser picture up on facebook. I really meant put them up here last week, but a combination of lots activity/travel and excessive laziness prevented me from doing so ;) Its past time now to post these cookies though because fall is finally in the air, and in some cases has jumped directly into wintry weather! Anyway, this time around I decided to add some "spice" to the cookie dough to really ring in the season.

I added aprox. 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp all spice, 1 tsp nutmeg, and "some" ginger to my normal sugar cookie recipe. The unbaked cookies were perfectly spiced, but once I put the icing on I think they could have used a little bit more. But since everything I do is SOOOO scientific it might take me a while to get the proportions just right.

You sadly can't really see the difference in the color of the dough in these pics, but it was a little bit darker than normal. I used the smallest pumpkin and leaf cutters from 2 sets I purchased at Michael's, which incidentally is an Excellent place to buy holiday/seasonal cookie cutters. I got about 25 fall cookie cutters for $13.99 by purchasing 2 different sets. Last year at Christmas I got 2 sets of miniature Christmas cutters for $2.99 each!

I love the way these turned out. I was kind of stumped about how to decorate the leaves because they were so small, but the swirl technique (which was used as an example on the cookie cutter box) turned out really cool. I only had to make 3 icing colors for these guys. They are also sprayed with a generous helping of gold luster dust which is adding a little bit of glare to the photos.

For the leaves, I made my icing a kind of medium consistency, not quite flow consistency, but definitely not stiff enough to pipe detail either, and used piping bags with plain #2 or #3 sized tips to pipe on the icing. I think they are really too small (for me) to use a knife to do a layer of flow over without making a huge mess. I was able to do about six cookies at a time and just covered aprox. half the cookies in one color and then went back with my second color to cover the rest and worked quickly to swirl the middle with a toothpick. You will need colors with some contrast to really see the swirl effect. If your icing is drying too quickly and not swirling properly you'll just have to do two or three at a time instead of 6. Also try to clean off your toothpick after every few cookies to keep the swirl really clean.

PS- Sean and I are officially dieting these days so I have to curtail my "baking for no good reason." Good thing we're gearing up for the holidays and I will HAVE to bake.