Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie is our guest for this week’s first Tutorial Tuesday post! She’s the expert when it comes to making cute cookies that are great for giving away as gifts or enjoying for yourself. Tomorrow, we’ll be featuring her Piggies on a Stick tutorial, but we want to ask her a few questions first. Here’s all you wanted to know about Meaghan, blogger and author of Cookie Sensations!

What first inspired you to become a cookie decorator?

While I’ve always enjoyed drawing, crafts and baking, I did not set out to be a cookie decorator. I had been managing a paint-your-own-pottery store when a woman who was opening her own cookie business came in, saw my display pieces and asked if I wanted to work for her, as she needed an artist. I agreed, though I had never picked up a frosting bag, thinking it would be a temporary job until I figured out what I really wanted to do. I spent ten years at the shop, leaving only because I had my daughter. Not only did the flexibility of the job enable me to continue working through my graduate degrees, but I loved it. And I found I was good at it. Just about any object you name, I’ve put on a cookie: Elvis, popcorn, movie cameras, bulldozers, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, mac n’ cheese, cartoon characters, appliances, every animal from alligators to zebras, sneakers, beer, martinis, people’s dogs, human organs… I could go on for pages with both the common and bizarre requests. And as my other world is literature (I’d like to publish children’s books), cookie decorating allowed me to write my first book, “Cookie Sensations,” and gain entry into the tightly locked publishing world.

Some folks (myself included :) find cookie decorating challenging, would you say the key to making the perfectly decorated cookie is in the frosting?

Yes. Yes. And one more yes. More so than the cookie itself. Even misshapen cookies can be decorated. In fact, for cookies that have no cutter, such as a woman in a yoga pose, I would cut out imperfect shapes or fit the design on other shapes. Frosting consistency is key. I tend to use the outline and fill method. I use one frosting of medium stiffness to both pipe an outline and fill in, as opposed to flooding (piping a stiff outline and filling with runny icing). The former is not as smooth, but gives you total control to do intricate designs.

Aside from the frosting, practice is the other key to perfectly decorated cookies. I’ve trained many cookie decorators over the years, and their early cookies aren’t even sellable. Time will help you build some hand muscle, control the frosting, maintain consistency with piping and rid of shaky lines or holes.

What are your favorite sugar cookie and frosting recipes to work with?

I have an almond sugar cookie on my blog and in my book that I love. It bakes perfectly without losing shape, has a bit of softness, and people go nuts for the flavor (I’ve seen party-goers stuff them in their pockets. Really.) I also only use the frosting recipe from my blog, also in the book. It’s a version of royal icing with meringue powder in lieu of fresh egg whites and shortening added for an ideal consistency. It dries enough to handle and package, needs no refrigeration, takes color well, and lasts for several weeks.

As a mom who holds a Masters in Liberal Arts with a children’s literature focus, have any of the cookies featured in your book, Cookie Sensations, been created with children in mind?

In terms of gifts for children, yes…sports cookies, baby shower cookies, bugs, etc. In terms of having kids decorate themselves, not as much. The art can be pretty challenging. But that said, I’ve had readers contact me with pictures of cookies their kids have baked using the book with raves of how much fun they’ve had. And the cookies looked amazing, so I may be underestimating young bakers. I am working on a proposal for a second book with even more user-friendly designs, which will translate better for kids (that is, simpler designs, such as the piggies).

Cookies are a fun and popular treat to make around the holidays. Do you have any tips or shortcuts to share with families who enjoy making cookies during the busiest times of the year?

With all on my plate, I feel like it’s always holiday time! When working on the book, I had to make hundreds of cookies quickly in a Washington, DC rowhouse with about a foot of kitchen counterspace. Efficiency is key. When I have a lot to bake, I rarely do everything in one day. I’ll make several batches of cookie dough and freeze portions in plastic bags, then let it thaw for a couple hours at room temperature (you want your dough chilled to roll, so don’t let it thaw too much). And the beauty of the frosting is that it will keep for weeks. So I also make several batches of frosting, mix all my colors and prepare all the frosting bags in advance. Making the dough and frosting and preparing the frosting bags are by far the most time-consuming steps, so getting these done ahead of time is a huge help. Come cookie decorating day, all I have to do is roll out, bake and decorate with minimal prep time.

Judging by the name of the cookies, you’d think they were a simple shortbread treat with a few poppy seeds thrown in for added texture and flavor. There is much more to Madalina’s Poppy Shortbread Cookies, though. They are literally poppy cookies, very clever and Duhlicious, which just so happens to be the name of her blog :).

Though these shortbread cookies might look too pretty to eat, you won’t be hesitant to gobble them up after the first bite. Everything about them is unique, from how their made to what they’re made of. Visit Madalina’s blog out for the in-debth tutorial! Buttery and sweet, the cookie dough is made of half flour and half cornstarch and icing sugar. I imagine, this unique combination of ingredients makes them easier to mold into poppies than traditional cookie dough.

Even if you forgot to pick up the poppy seeds, or you’re allergic, you can still make these fun cookies using crushed Oreos! But don’t forget to take Madalina’s advice when she says that you shouldn’t use a water based food coloring for the cookies. Why? Because the poppies won’t have the same bright and cheery shade of red as her cookies do!

DickandDebbie reinvent fast-food fish and chips with their no-fuss baked Fish and Chips recipe. This guilt-free treat will satisfy your craving for something fresh! Another healthy ingredient that’s used in this recipe, that you might not have even considered using before, is bran oil!

Bran oil is what gives the Panko breadcrumb mix a cohesive and slightly moist texture so that a crispy piece of fish results from the baking process. The freshness comes from the lemon, fresh parsley, and capers — savory ingredients that are also added to the breadcrumb mix. And the potatoes? They’re lightly fried in butter, just a teaspoon of the good stuff does the trick. You’ll have golden potatoes to go with your crispy baked fish in no time.

This is the meal to make on a busy day. It’s light, tasty, and doesn’t require much planning. You can prepare this in about a half hour!

The storage system that Key Ingredient uses to store images, Amazon’s S3, is currently having some trouble. Because of this, a large number of recipe photos and user icons are not available.

Rest assured, your content is safe and will be back online soon. Amazon’s S3 service has been very reliable and situations like this are very rare. Even so, we are investigating ways to combine resources with S3 to ensure hiccups like this don’t happen in the future.

Also, if you are trying to log in and the login page looks a little strange–not to worry, you can still log in as normal :)

Update:

Key Ingredient is back to full strength. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Interesting tidbit: a top search item on Google yesterday was burrito. We’ve seen research that says consumers prefer the Internet for recipe search to any other medium. This seems to back that up .. along with “hangover” being a top search as well!

The rub here is that we believe people want to search for recipes online, but they want to find and collect them even more more. Makes sense to me. That’s why I have piles of clippings of recipes in a box. In the ad-driven online world, the relationship ends with a consumer finding what they are looking for. It puts recipes sites and consumers at odds: sites make money off of multiple searches; consumers want to find the perfect recipes as soon as possible. Seems backwards. Consumers want to find recipes and save them, maybe even modify them to their taste. That’s what Key Ingredient is all about.

How do we stay in business? We add value. The next step in having a recipe collection is sharing it. We can help with our widget and on-demand custom cookbooks. Cookbooks are the perfect gift and our widget can earn bloggers addition money from embedded advertising (still in the works). With Key Ingredient finding a recipe is the beginning of a relationship, not the end. That makes more sense to us as a company and as customers.

Well all great things start small, and this great thing has been a long time coming! Below is our recipe widget that we have been working on for quite some time. Why use it? Well, it turns a recipe from simple unstructured text into a nicely formatted object. This allows a reader to save your recipe into their collection, email it to a friend or print a nicely formatted page. In addition, saving it will keep a permanent link to the original blog post that they got it from, even if they modify the recipe to their own tastes. It creates a legacy of credit that is nice for everyone.

The widget also will update any changes that you make to the recipe on Key Ingredient. We are really excited about this new tool and look forward to getting bloggers to give it a spin!

A couple of caveats:

>The recipe embed code (a button to the right of the recipe marked Blog This) has to be added in Wordpress with the visual editor shut off. Don’t really know why, but this is the same issue in Wordpress for embedding YouTube videos.

>I’ve added some styling before the embed code to push the widget off of the left edge of the blog. I added <p style=”margin-left:100px> before the embed code and a </p> after it. This styling pushes the widget to the right of your blog posting area by 100 pixels. You can move it further right by increasing the value and to the left by decreasing it. With no styling, the widget will appear flush left.

More soon and looking for feedback!

One of the great mysteries in the Web 2.0 world is: how and when to make money for your enterprise. This has been an issue for Key Ingredient right from the start, but in a surprising way. When we were demoing the site, one of the first questions frequently was: how much does this cost? It turned out that our splash page (implemented by Emily Busey after about 20 iterations) looked “far too good to be free”.

Well, we are consumers too, and we feel that most food sites make their money by bombarding you with display ads. Literally. In fact, Recipezaar took this to such an extreme that the only path to ad-relief was to pay them. This has changed now that they are part of Scripps, but the ad density was like watching 3 televisions at once. Food Network, also part of Scripps, has toned it down some recently as well. Allrecipes was another ad blaster, since reduced after their acquisition by Reader’s Digest and subsequently by Ripplewood. So the solution to ad overload seems to be to sell to a company that doesn’t need the revenue.

But the question remains: how can you make money in a way that is reasonable both to the consumer and the site? I think the answer is to add value. By this I mean offering services that are attractive to the consumer (that includes us!) and that offer the company a sustainable revenue stream. We have created on-demand publishing services for cookbooks, we are working on our recipe transcription service (coming as soon as we can manage it), and we are working with forms of recipe sponsorship that will not destroy the calm aesthetic we have created around our recipe interface. Stay tuned.