Cardinal Cookies

Normally this time of year, it's starting to look like spring.  But this year we still have several feet of snow on the ground!  In honor of the hearty cardinals that stick around up north all year adding color to the white landscape, I decided to make some cardinal cookies.

Usually, I use the outline-and-flood method for frosting my sugar cookies.  But I decided to try something new: 20-Second Icing.  Sweet Sugarbelle has a fantastic tutorial on achieving this consistency, somewhere between outlining and flooding consistencies. (click to see tutorial)  Using 20-second icing, I can eliminate decorating bags and just use squeeze bottles. It's a lot faster!  The frosting is runny enough to flow nicely and dry smoothly, but it's stiff enough to stay where you put it.

By the time I finished adding the wings, the beaks were dry enough to outline in black.  I waited about a half hour before frosting the rest of the bird to give everything else a chance to dry a bit.  It doesn't have to be completely dry, just dry enough to not flow together.

20-Second Icing wasn't the only new thing I tried for these cookies.  I tried making them gluten-free.  I've made a couple other attempts at gluten-free sugar cookies with disastrous results.  These are actually pretty good.  I'm going to tinker a bit more with the recipe to get the taste a little sweeter and less dry before I share the recipe.  Stay tuned!