About a week or so ago I discovered that Williams-Sonoma had come out with a set of Star Wars cookie cutters. There are 4 in the box: Yoda, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and a Stormtrooper. I had to own it.
The set cost $19.95, a bit pricey for 4 plastic cookie cutters, but it is Williams-Sonoma and the Star Wars name does cost money.
As soon as I got them, I couldn't wait to use them. So I figured Memorial Day was as good a reason as any to make Star Wars cookies. I knew it was going to be a huge undertaking, I have never actually decorated cookies with royal icing (I'm a buttercream person) and I had only ever used it once before. So, I set aside the entire day to work on these. Six and half hours later, I'm pretty happy with the results.
The cookie cutters came with a recipe for sugar cookies and royal icing from "The Williams-Sonoma Kitchen". I decided to use their recipes and, to be honest, there is nothing too special about them. Both cookie and icing recipes were very easy to make. The dough rolled out nicely and the cookie cutters worked great! They have a spring to push down on and it presses the details into the cookie.
They baked beautifully, GBD as Alton Brown would say. I was worried about the varying thickness, stamping the details on them made sections of the cookie thinner, but that caused no problems. Yoda's ears were a bit darker than the rest of the cookie, but they weren't burned.
According to the directions, the recipe would make about 32 cookies (8 of each design) I actually got over 5 dozen cookies. Next time, I think I'm going to make them thicker.
Then I outlined and flooded the cookies in their main colors with royal icing. The icing recipe did end up very thick and it had to be thinned down quite a bit to flood the cookies and decorate. I used a plastic squeeze bottle and toothpicks to smooth the icing. One important lesson I learned is that next time I'm going to use less icing in the flooding, I ended up over filling the details and when I decorated them, I had to freehand it and that was tortureous.
I waited an hour to let the icing harden and then I got to decorating. It was tedious work, a lot of dying icing and having to clean and reclean tips and couplers. The hardest one to do was Darth Vader, he had the most details on such a small cookie. I used a #1 Tip and it still seemed too big. I also realized that Darth Vader's features are kind of cat-like. But overall, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.
And even more important than how they look, is how they taste. Now, I didn't try all of them, but I can attest to the deliciousness that is Boba Fett.
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