Iced Butterfly Cookies

I treated myself to a Peggy Porschen book with my birthday money 'Peggy's Favourite Cakes & Cookies'. I was so impressed with the cookies decorated with royal icing I couldn't wait to have a go myself.

The cookies in the book are absolutely beautiful and full instructions are given on how to make the cookies and then the different consistencies of icing needed to decorate them.

I've only ever used royal icing once before when decorating a large cake to put little dots all over it so that doesnt really count at all...so basically I was a complete novice! I actually thought I was pretty ok at piping since I pipe butter cream onto cupcakes allll the time. However, ask me to pipe an outline onto a cookie...the pressure is on and my hands are shaking like mad!

The recipe made a huuuge amount of cookies...think I had about 30 in the end...so plenty to practice on. Have a look at my piccies...I don't think they are a bad first attempt but definitely something I want to keep practicing. I sooo want them to look as perfect as they do in the book!!

Back to Baking

As you all might have guessed, I haven't been doing alot of baking recently! The last time I baked was September and then after that I got a bit poorly - just my silly immune playing up. I was gutted I missed out on christmas baking - I had so many ideas for different cupcakes and wanted to make mince pies etc etc...roll on next year!!

I had Friday booked off work so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to get back into baking. My friend Jenny has been going through a rough time and as I was going round on Friday night what better way to try and cheer someone up than with cake...perfect!

I went for something really simple to ease me back into baking - a vanilla layer cake. I know I've blogged about this before but as this was my first time back in the kitchen baking I thought I'd get it on my blog! I was paranoid the whole time the cake was in the oven hoping it would turn out ok and it did!! Hooray! Heres a pic to prove it: