Violet Cookies

I know it's not Spring yet, but it is right around the corner.

Besides warmer weather, I'm really looking forward to the emergence of some color in my garden and couldn't resist getting ahead of the season and making a batch of these pretty Violet Cookies.

Using the wet-on-wet decorating technique and different icing colors, you could make other flower varieties as well.  The only trick is to have all your icing colors mixed and ready in piping bags before you begin decorating — All of the colors have to be flood consistency and added one right after the other.

Start with decorating one cookie at a time and once you get the hang of it, you can move onto decorating up to three cookies at once in assembly-line style. 

Here's how:

Bake some round sugar cookies and get your flood consistency royal all ready, tinted and bagged.  I mixed white, lavender, dark purple and bright yellow. I fitted the white and lavender icing bags with #2 tips and the dark purple and bright yellow icing bags with #1 tips.

Outline and fill the cookie with white icing and immediately add five lavender dots.

Use a skewer, toothpick or scribe tool to swipe through the dots. I swiped through these twice but later decided that just a single swipe was better. Be sure to wipe your tool clean after each swipe so that the design stays neat.

After swiping through all of the dots, add five dark purple dots to the bottom of the petals.

Move your skewer, toothpick or scribe tool up and down through the dark purple dots.

Here is a flower with just one swipe through the petals and more exaggerated swipes through the dark purple. This is the look I like best but it took some experimenting to get to it. When working on a new design I always bake a few extra cookies because I know practice makes perfect. Now all this cookie needs is a drop of bright yellow icing in the center. The cookies need to dry completely before packaging or serving, this take about 8 hours.

Closeup of the finished cookies.