Back to School Apple Cookies Tutorial

Back to school chalkboard cookies are fun on their own, but they're a lot more fun if you throw some apple cookies (and miniature apple cookies) into the mix!  

Over here on Tikkido, I wanted to write a quick tutorial on how to make the apple sugar cookies.

I started by whipping up a batch of my favorite No Fail Sugar Cookies, cutting out and baking the apple shapes.  Outline and flood the cookies with red royal icing.

While the red icing is still really fresh and wet, quickly add two drops of white icing to an upper corner of the apple cutout.

Use a clean toothpick to drag some of the white icing down to create a kind of comma shape.  Try to follow the curve of the apple, but don't obsess about it.  Adding this little reflection is so simple, but it gives the cookie so much more dimension and character.

Once the body of the apple has had time to set a bit (no need to let it dry completely, though), add a stem with a bit of brown royal icing.  I like using a thicker royal icing for the stem, rather than a flooding consistency icing, to give the stem some dimension.  

All that remains to be added is the leaf.  If you don't have a leaf tip, you can rig your own with a pair of scissors and a parchment cone.  (This trick works better with parchment cones than the disposable plastic kind.)  Make up your cone, and cut out an inverted V shape from the end of the cone.  That's it.  It'll now make beautiful leaves!

The exact same technique is used to make the tiny apple cookies I added to the chalkboard cookies.  I tried just making some royal icing apples, and they were ok, but my favorite look, by far, used the mini apple cookies.

Do you do anything special for the new teacher when your kids head back to school?  This is actually the first time I've done anything like this at the beginning of the year.