Baking Cookies with Little B's Batches

Hi there! I’m Sarah— also known as “That TV6 Girl” and also starting to be called “Are you the one that made those cookies?” Yes, I am that girl on TV, and I am the one that made those cookies! 

Aside from reading off a teleprompter for two hours every morning (and waking up at disgusting hours to do it— go ahead. Ask me when I wake up and get to work. …I get up at midnight and get to work at 1 a.m. YEP.), I also enjoy baking! For the past few years I’ve been teaching myself how to make and decorate sugar cookies with royal icing through various cookie blogs and YouTube tutorials. I’ve also recently started an Instagram page called Little B’s Batches (@littlebbatches) where I share some of my cookie creations. 

As a disclaimer, I am in no way a professional baker, and I have zero professional training in baking, but I do enjoy baking and I also really enjoy eating! I am a self-taught baker, so take my tips with a grain of salt (ha- baking humor!)

Buckle in, friends. It’s gonna be long post—there’s a LOT to cover! Let’s get started!

First, pick your favorite roll-out cookie dough recipe. I have one that I really like that I’ve adapted from others’ recipes, but I decided against sharing that recipe because I don’t want you to think there’s only one right recipe. There’s no magic recipe for perfect cookies, it’s all just about ingredient ratios, baking temperature, what type of pans you use, etc. For example, if your cookies are spreading, see if you didn’t add enough flour, maybe you added too much baking soda or baking powder, maybe you melted your butter (DO NOT MELT YOUR BUTTER. LET IT SOFTEN TO ROOM TEMPERATURE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? NEVER. MELT. THE BUTTER. STOP IT. Ok I’m glad we talked about that.) Some call for chilling dough, others don’t.  Play around with different recipes to see what you like and what works for you! 

One thing to note: I prefer baking with light colored aluminum pans. I use Nordic Ware, you can buy it at Walmart. But if you like cookies that are browned a little more on the bottom, you can bake with a darker sheet. I like cookies that are just as pale as I am (HA) so I use light aluminum sheets.  

Another thing you should do for yourself that helps with all baking and cooking (and is something I believe every single person that has an oven should own)— buy an oven thermometer! You can buy these just about anywhere. I guarantee you your oven does NOT heat up to the temperature you think it’s set to. My oven heats about 30 degrees cooler than what I set it to. My mom’s oven heats about 20 degrees hotter. Case in point, buy yourself an oven thermometer. You’ll thank me later. 

For rolling out your dough, I like to chill the dough for an hour or so beforehand just to make cutting out the shapes easier. It’s not necessary for baking (usually), and my cookies wouldn’t spread if I didn’t chill the dough first, but I always try to do it when I have time because cutting room-temperature dough will make for fingerprints on your cookies when you transfer them over to a cookie sheet.

If you like making roll-out cookies often (or perhaps to make lots of pie crusts or cinnamon rolls or something), I would highly recommend buying rolling pin guides! I bought mine at a kitchen goods store a few years ago. Mine are silicone so they wash easy, and they slide right on the ends of the rolling pin to ensure every cookie is the exact same thickness. It was a life changing purchase! That’s what those little blue things at the end of my rolling pin are.

Link: Rolling Pin Guides

Oh, and let’s not forget to have a quick chat about cookie cutters! You can honestly find a cookie cutter of anything you can possibly imagine. You want a unicorn? There’s bazillions. You need Pokemon? You got it. You need a turkey wearing a pilgrim hat? Yep. It’s real. I have a lot of cutters from Sweet Sugarbelle, which you can find at Michaels craft stores. I also have lots by Wilton, and I am gradually collecting more and more from some of my favorite cookie cutter shops on Etsy (Kaleidacuts in particular is BOMB). Shuffle through my IG “pages I follow” to look for more cutter creators. 

OK, now that we’ve finished baking the cookies, let’s get to the fun part— ROYAL ICING! This is not your typical buttercream frosting. Actually, it’s not frosting at all, and there is no butter in it. Royal icing is more like a meringue. Actually, it’s totally a meringue. It’s made with egg whites and powdered sugar, and it’s the same kind of icing that’s used on gingerbread houses. It crusts up to be solid to the touch and shouldn’t be easily impressed, but it should also be a soft crunch to the bite. I do not use actual egg whites in mine because I worry about potential contamination, so I and many, many, many other cookiers use meringue powder. It’s basically dehydrated egg whites. There are different variations for making royal icing, but most royal icing recipes are extremely similar! Here is what I use that I have adapted from others’ recipes:

Little B’s Batches Royal Icing

-4 TBSP meringue powder (I use Wilton brand, which can be found at Walmart and Michaels) | Link: Wilton Meringue Powder

-1/2 c (slightly less) of room temperature water

-1 TBSP extract (I do about 2 tsp vanilla and 1 tsp almond)

-1/2 tsp light corn syrup (this help it not be a rock hard crust)

-4 c powdered sugar

1. In a wet measuring cup, whisk together the meringue powder and water until the powder is dissolved.

2. Pour it into your mixing bowl and whisk until semi-stiff bubbles form, and add your extract to the mix. (I use the whisk attachment on my KitchenAid)

3. Add ALL four cups of powdered sugar at once to your bowl (trust me, it’s not going to explode into a dust cloud like you think it will) and mix until just combined. It should look almost like shampoo/conditioner. 

4. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl so everything is incorporated. 

5. Now turn your mixer on high, and let ‘er run for a good five to seven minutes until stiff peaks form. It should look sort of like toothpaste. 

What you have just made is your piping/outline consistency icing. This is what I use to make designs, flowers, and to outline the cookie before flooding to create a dam so the icing doesn’t spill off the cookie. Flooding is how to fill in the cookie with icing to create a smooth surface. For flooding consistency icing, scoop some of your outline icing into a bowl, and SLOWLY add little amounts of water and mix until it reaches the consistency of lava. It should settle into its self in about 10 to 15 seconds. (To check, take a spatula and lift up some of the icing to make a ribbon of icing across your icing, and watch it settle back to a smooth surface.) It shouldn’t settle too fast, otherwise it’ll spill right over your outline icing. This is the stage when you should color your icing. I recommend taking a big scoop of outline icing in a bowl, color the icing, put about a third of it in a piping bag, and THEN add water to the rest in the bowl to loosen it to flooding consistency. This way, you don’t have to try to match outline and flooding icing by doing it separately. Make sense?

An easy way to get icing into a piping bag (which you can buy at Walmart or Michaels—you can use Wilton brand, but I have been using a cheaper brand I found in Amazon that works just as well) is to hang the bag open over the mouth of a drinking glass. Spread open the bag, and use a spatula to scoop the icing inside. Then tie or use a clip to shut the top of the bag to make sure none of your icing spills out the top. I use Ikea bag clips because I’m terrible at tying the bags! And clips can be reused! Use this process for both your outline and flooding icings.

Link: Wilton Piping Bag

To decorate your cookies, first create your icing dam with the outline consistency icing. Snip a tiny hole in the corner of your piping bag with outline consistency icing in it, then SLOWLY draw an outline around the entire cookie. It’s not as easy as writing with a pen, so take it slow! Try to keep your bag as vertical as possible—it feels more natural to hold it tilted like a pen, but it flows better and is easier to control and make a smoother edge if you hold the bag vertically. After you’ve outlined the cookie, you can flood it with your flooding icing. Just snip a tiny hole in your piping bag with your flooding consistency icing in it, and cover the cookie entirely. I find it easier to start at the edges and go in a circle of sorts toward the center. Your flooding icing should settle into itself to create that smooth, glassy surface, but if it doesn’t, you can take a toothpick and swirl it smooth.

Finally, let your cookies dry (or you can eat it while the icing is still wet, but they don’t travel well that way!). It usually takes about three or four hours for it to fully dry, and about 30 to 45 minutes to crust over to add more icing designs on top, but if my house is humid, it could take an entire 24 hours to dry completely. You can speed up the process by setting them in front of a fan. Some cookiers even put theirs in a dehydrator, and they’ll be crusted over and almost dry completely in 15 minutes! Crazy!! I’m not that legit, I just use a box fan!

And there you have it! Those are the basics of how I make and decorate my cookies. There’s loads of different designs you can do, like creating flowers, writing, creating wet-on-wet designs (which is when you create a design in the wet flooding icing with different colored flooding icing—check out the white flooded cookie with little rosebuds on it!) and so many other fun things! I also have an entire arsenal of various sprinkles that is probably embarrassing, but I love it. (Do you guys realize that sprinkles aren’t just “sprinkles”?? There’s pearl sprinkles, jimmies, sanding sugar, disco dust, nonpareils… the sprinkle world is where I want to live for the rest of my life.)

Anyway, cookies are meant to be fun! So don’t stress if it’s a challenge the first time you try it, because at the end of the day, it’s all going in your belly!

Check out my IG @littlebbatches and feel free to DM me if you have questions!

-Sarah Blakely