Join Us On FacebookThe month of August marks the beginning of a new school year! For most students, a new school year means back-to-school shopping for new school supplies and new outfits, and also, my favorite, making new friends! Although I won’t be starting school with you, consider me your new friend in baking! I’m Jenice and I just recently joined the amazing BakeGreek team. I look forward to following along with you throughout the school year, making new friends, exploring the world of baking and cookie decorating, and sharing adventurous stories over BakeGreek cookies.
Enough about me…you’ll get to know me better through each post, it’s late August and that means time to get prepped for Recruitment. After being apart from your sorority sisters over the summer, a great way to welcome them back and to welcome potential new members is to put your BakeGreek cookie cutters to use. Inspired by the Truly Sisters website http://www.trulysisters.com/ which sells cute sorority stationary and gifts (and also invitations and free downloadable computer wallpaper), I decided to decorate some BakeGreek cookies using polka dot and stripe designs inspired by the website.
1. Prepare your work surface and get all of your tools ready. I want to highlight a few key items that I use for baking roll out cookies – parchment paper which provides a disposable non stick surface, and “The Smart Rolling Pin” which ensures precise thickness on all of your cookies.
2. After baking your BakeGreek cookies (see http://www.bakegreek.com/baking-a-bakegreek-cookie/ for a tutorial on how to do this), you can use the Imprinting technique to create designs on your cookies before baking them that will assist you when decorating. This technique is especially useful if you’re not great at freehand decorating (like me!).
To use the Imprinting technique, use other cookie cutters or a pairing knife to lightly imprint designs onto your pre-baked rolled out cookies. I used a small circle cookie cutter to create polka dot designs onto my cookies. When using this technique, be sure to apply light pressure to create only an imprint of the design onto your cookies. If you place too much pressure, you’ll end up with cut out shapes on your cookies (which is also another option for decorating).
This cookie is ready for baking!
3. Once your cookies are done baking and have cooled off, it’s now time to outline them. For my imprinted BakeGreek cookies, i’ve outlined both the outside of the cookie as well as the imprinted design. This is where the pre-imprinted designs come in handy!
4. After giving your outlined BakeGreek cookies about 10 minutes to set, you can now fill & flood them. I used the stationary on the Truly Sisters website to help me decide what color pairings I wanted to use for my cookies.
5. Once your BakeGreek cookies have completely dried, you can package them and have them ready to give out at your recruitment events or as a special gift for your Big Sis or Lil Sis!
As you can see I used several other techniques to create a variety of cookies that you can use for recruitment including sinking the icing (piping a design freehand while the flooded icing is still wet), as well as the opposite technique which involves piping a design freehand after the flooded icing is dry to creat a 3D effect.
On the bottom left corner you’ll see a “Zeta” cookie pop…cookie pops make great gifts, and with the rising popularity of cake pops and cupcake pops, it’s a must that BakeGreek cookies join in on the lollipop fun. We will make these on a future post in the very near future!
