Crown Cake & Easy Icing glaze for cookies

It has been over a month since I've written anything here and what a month it has been.... First, we celebrated Anushka's birthday (she is 7 now and growing up super fast) and I had every intention of posting the cake that I made for her birthday this year.... She couldn't decide on what she wanted this year and eventually picked a 'Crown Cake'.... but before I could post anything , I received word that my grandfather passed away and though he hasn't been doing too well, it still came as a total shock to us and it took me a while to come to terms with it. I still can't believe he is gone and so many days I catch myself thinking I have to give him a call only to realize seconds later that he is not there anymore....

Then, November happened and this is one of the busiest months at work and this year it was crazier than usual and we had a whole horde of issues to deal with... I felt a bit like that super hero on Incredibles where he says "it's like I just cleaned up this mess and there's another one already" - we had issue after issue but all in all, it worked out good eventually and I learnt a lot in the process.  Most days I had no time to cook and we just ordered food from outside or relied on frozen food and I felt quite grumpy that I couldn't cook - because, for me, it's a great way to relax and I was also feeling awful about eating unhealthy stuff. Things are slowly returning to normalcy though...

Here are some pictures of the Cookie Crown Cake I made for Anushka... you could use any of your favorite cakes &  stack them up - I went with a lemon pound cake this year. The cookies were the time consuming part and mine could've turned out better. I used the recipe from here and they even give you a .pdf that has a template to use for the cookie. I printed that out, cut it out and traced it onto a piece of clean cardboard and used that to cut out the sugar cookies. I however did not sprinkle them with the yellow sugar as suggested and used an icing glaze instead - it was super easy to whip up and definitely something I'm going to use when decorating sugar cookies. It also made it easy to stick the candy onto the cookies and ensured that they stayed put. Anushka had fun decorating the cookies with me. You could do these a day ahead and also bake and frost the cakes the day ahead too and a few hours before serving, you could stick the cookies to the cake - I stuck to my favorite Whipped Cream frosting (with a bit of cream cheese) - recipe here.

EASY ICING GLAZE - for half cup of glaze

Ingredients:

Confectioner's sugar - 1 cup
Water - 2 tbsp
Light Corn Syrup - 1 tbsp
Food Coloring - as desired

Method:
Stir sugar, water and corn syrup together in a bowl and add desired food coloring. I used yellow in this case but you can split up the glaze and use different colours. It dries up quite easily and is very easy to work with.
1) Cut out cookies using the template and bake them. Allow to cool completed before glazing. Ensure the cookies aren't too thick - it should be 1/4 inch thickness when you roll them out. 



Cookies Cut out and ready to be baked



2) Apply the glaze over cookie and stick the candies (I used m&m, mini M&ms and a bigger candy).

3) Decorate the cookies once the glaze has dried up using white icing or with more glaze. I did  a rush job since it was really late at night and I was super tired.



4) Stick the cookies to the side of the cake. Next time I would stick them closer to each other. I think it would look better that way.

Another shot of the cake.... I wasn't impressed with how the cake turned out (the one on the Family Fun website was much cooler looking) but my daughter said she loved it and told me not to worry and that this was great for my first attempt. I was also quite thrilled that my 3 yr old immediately recognized it as a crown... he actually wanted me to put it on his head - the silly fellow.