One Direction Sugar Cookies

Hello! It's been several days since I've written on here, and we've been pretty busy. Joe and I spent this past weekend in Seattle to celebrate my oldest sister's wedding with my family. We had an awesome time, and the weather there could not have been more perfect! I plan to write a post about the wedding and the cake I made soon, but that will be a long one and I need to get some sleep tonight :) In the mean time, I'll just say congratulations to Sara and Andy!

Pretty much as soon as we got back from Seattle I had 2 baking projects to work on. One was actually a cake order from a coworker, and the other was these cookies that I wanted to make for my little sister's birthday since she and my parents would be passing by our house on their way home from Seattle to Ohio. You see, Gracie is a HUGE fan of the British band One Direction and she even got to see them in concert a couple weeks ago. I'd seen the idea for these cookies on a blog called The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle, and made a mental note that I had to make them for Grace some day. The lady behind the Sugarbelle blog is a cookie genius and some of her creations are just amazing and way too far out of my league. But for these, she actually provided a template that she used for each member of the band, so I felt like I could tackle it.

I started by making her sugar cookie recipe and baking some circles and hearts. Everyone who tried these cookies loved them, but I have to say they honestly weren't my favorite. Something about the texture was funny to me, but I was the only one who thought so. Oh well. Then I made a batch of her royal icing. And started mixing my colors. (You can find all of her recipes in the FAQs section of her blog by clicking the link above.) The first step was to flood the circle cookies with white icing. Then while those were setting up, I decorated the heart cookies. Once the white icing on the circles was dried enough, I cut out all the little faces from the template, and used a food safe marker to trace them on the cookies.

Then I filled in all their little faces. One tip from the Sugarbelle blog is to use squeeze bottles instead of icing bags. I did that for the boy's hair and faces and it really was MUCH easier than using an icing bag.

Then I added the hair. This required mixing a few different colors, and some even had highlights :)

Finally, I outlined everything in black and added their names!

These cookies did take a few hours, but overall they were easier than I expected. Grace said she could have told who was who even if the names weren't there, so that's good. :) I think she liked them! Happy Belated Birthday, Gracie!

Now that I know they're not too hard, I'll definitely try decorating more cookies in the future. I guess that's it for tonight! I hope you all have a great week.