David Bowie Lightening Bolt Cookies

 

These lightening bolt sugar cookies are for the upcoming David Bowie alternative liturgy at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.  

I wanted to mimic the lightening bolt on the cover of David's 1973 album "Aladdin Sane," but I couldn't find a two section lighting bolt cookie cutter.  My solution was to buy a three section lightening bolt cutter and simply cut one part off before baking.

The cookies came together fairly quickly and were fun to make. The real secret to success is making certain your icing isn't too thin because the areas you need to fill are narrow and you don't want the icing running off the sides.

Usually I use 10 to 15 second icing for flooding. This means that a line drawn through the icing with a table knife settles back into place and disappears in 10 to 15 seconds.

For these cookies I used 20 to 25 second icing and had a scribe tool on hand to help ease the icing into place.

Here's how to make them:

The only lightening bolt cutter I could find.

Cut out the cookie.

Cut off on section of the lightening bolt.

Cookies that are ready to be baked.

Using a #2 tip, outline the lightening bolt with red 20 to 25 second royal icing, leaving a blank strip on one side.

Using the same #2 tip and red icing, fill in the section.

Repeat this on all of the cookies.

Using piping consistency black royal icing and a #1 tip, add a single line to all the cookies.

Add a few lines of blue royal icing, using a #2 tip and 20 to 25 second icing, to fill in the rest of the cookie. Use a scribe tool or skewer to blend the lines together. Now all you have to do is let the royal icing dry before packaging or serving.

If you don't have a lightening bolt cutter, an alternative is to pipe lightening bolts onto plain round cookies that have been flooded with white icing. I made some of these for the liturgy too. I hope you can join us.