Stars and Stripes Cookies for the 4th of July

It is the 4th of July today, American Independence Day.  To mark this occasion, I have made Stars and Stripes Cookies using my improved biscuit decorating skills from my course at Miss Biscuit in Seddon (post to come).

I made Miss Biscuit's no chill vanilla sugar cookie dough - if you are interested in the recipe, you can buy it in downloadable form here.

Here are my baked cookies:

I was going to make star shaped cookies, but my star cutter is tiny - too tiny for the design I wanted to do, which was inspired by a design on Pinterest.

Here is my icing equipment all set up ready to go, as we did in our Miss Biscuit class: 

The base recipe for royal icing was again Miss Biscuit's recipe, which is made using egg white powder rather than raw egg whites.  I made black outlining icing (which used a ton of black gel colouring!), and red, white and blue for the flooding icing.

Here are the outlined cookies ready for flooding: 

Here are the cookies after the first stage of flooding:

And here they are, all finished:

To help the icing dry out in our cold and wet weather, I placed the cookies in the oven on low heat (120 degrees Celsius - that's as low as my oven will go) for 15 minutes.  This is a trick I learned from The Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits, though they put their cookies in the oven at 50-70 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes instead.

These cookies are quite time consuming to make, but I think they turned out great.

Happy 4th of July to all of my US readers!