tracing

By the time this is posted, one team has already been eliminated from the tournament.

I blame my poor time management on my husband (of course) who told me that the first game of the semifinals was on Wednesday, not Tuesday.

(Let’s not focus on the fact that there are plenty of other, more credible, sources of World Cup scheduling information that are easy to come by.)

Regardless, I have been excited to make these cookies since the World Cup started. We are avid ~~soccer~~ football fans in this household, so we have watched just about every weekend game, and some of the weekday games.

While our team (zie Germans) didn’t get very far this year, we have enjoyed watching some old and new favorites duke it out on the pitch. It’s also been fun for me to sit back and relentlessly mock the players who seem to get hurt so easily (<cough>Neymar).

But I better not waste any more time or else another team will have been eliminated by the time I get around to showing you how I made these fun World Cup sugar cookies.

Supplies and Recipes

For these cookies, you will need:

Cookies cut into circles, jerseys/shirts, and a speech bubble.
Royal icing in black (both piping and flood), white, red, blue (light and dark), and yellow
A print out image of a soccer ball approximately the same size as your cookie
Plain white tissue paper
Food marker
Piping bags or zip-top bags
Toothpick or scribe tool

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How to Make Them

Oddly enough, the soccer balls were the hardest of the cookies to make. Something about the combination of pentagons and hexagons makes it really hard to draw freehand.

Fortunately, I have a trick to getting the perfectly patterned soccer ball: tracing!

You can see in the video that I use a piece of tissue paper to trace over the image with a food marker. Then I trace the tracing (follow me?) onto the cookie through the tissue.

I have better pictures to demonstrate the technique here.

Other than the soccer balls, the rest of the cookies were pretty straightforward. The jerseys can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like. You can see I added some additional details to the emblems, but that certainly isn’t necessary.

So, who do you think is going to win the whole thing? I don’t really want to jinx anything, but I think it will be one of these four teams.

This is part two of my Mother’s Day cookie post. There was just too much to fit all in one post! Floral monogram cookies AND lean how to trace on to a cookie?! I think we would have all been overwhelmed. Plus, I think this technique deserves it’s very own post since it can be used for so many different things: fonts, images, designs, patterns, etc. Anything you don’t feel comfortable drawing freehand with icing, you can do using this technique to trace onto cookies!

But before you can decorate, you need some cookies! For these Mother’s Day cookies I flavored my favorite sugar cookie recipe with a touch of lavender and a whole lot of vanilla bean.

The resulting cookie was this subtly floral vanilla cookie that was so good. I was so afraid of going overboard with the lavender, that I just added a touch to the sugar before I mixed the sugar into the butter. I blended the sugar and lavender together so that each bite would have a very subtle hint of it.

I didn’t feel the need to hold back on the vanilla, however. I went all out! You can see all the lovely vanilla beans sprinkled throughout the dough. If you look closely, you can sort of make out pieces of lavender, too!

Okay, so now let’s get to the reason you are here: learning to trace onto cookies!

It’s simple and requires only a couple special tools that you may already have around your house or kitchen: tissue paper and a edible food marker.

First find an image or text that you like and print it out onto normal paper. (I found this one on Google Images and thought it would fit perfectly on my plaque cookies.)

Top your printed image with a sheet of clean tissue paper. Then trace the image with an edible food marker.

Take the sheet of tissue paper with your image or font traced on it and place it onto of the cookie, making sure that it’s perfectly situated.

Trace over it again with the edible food marker. Don’t press too hard because you will risk tearing the tissue paper. You should be able to trace two to three times with the same tissue paper.

Viola! The text or image has now transferred onto the cookie! From here you can just trace over the ink with your icing.

I say that like it’s no big deal. Tracing the image with the icing is probably the hardest part. I still have yet to master writing cursive letters with icing.

Since the original image had some flowers on the bottom, I added some flowers to my cookies.

Now they go perfectly with the other floral monogram cookies I shared on Wednesday.

Wouldn’t you mom love these cookies? Well, even if you are reading this far from Mother’s Day I hope you have learned how to trace text or an image onto your cookies. I promise, this trick will come in really handy!

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