For the 1st LSU game of the season we had some friends over to watch the game. Patrick was in charge of the hot dogs, brats, and beer. And I made blackberry mint juleps (thank you, Martha Stewart) and LSU sugar cookies.
I made the dough the night before from a Bon Appetit recipe for Orange Cardamom Sugar Cookies and cut the shapes with some cookie cutters I found at Hobby Lobby. At that point in their baked but undecorated state my sister-in-law lovingly pointed out that they looked like mishapen mushrooms and Christmas trees. Also, I burned a few, kept having to put the dough back in the refrigerator to harden, and nearly gave up on them. So, I just finished baking them and went to bed.
The next morning I made icing and decorated the cookies. To make the icing I mixed together 3 c. powdered sugar, 1 1/2 tbsp. lemon juice, 1 1/2 tsp. light corn syrup, and just enough water to get it to the right consistency for spreading onto the cookies. I followed the directions on the box to make purple and gold, but added a little extra red to make a more LSU-like purple.
Later, for piping on designs I put the icing into a Ziploc bag and added a little powdered sugar so that it'd be a little thicker and easier to draw letters and lines.
I felt like a total genius for turning plain white icing into a rich football brown color (this is an iPhone photo, so you may not be able to tell very well here, but it was gorgeous, I promise). When I googled "how to make brown icing" the results were less than helpful, with most sites suggesting that I mix equal parts of red, blue, and yellow food coloring together. If you do this you will get brown, but it will be a gross, unappetizing shade of brown. So, I experimented by adding equal parts red and blue, then way more red, then a little yellow to warm up the color. I don't remember the exact proportions - something like 30 drops of red, 10 drops of blue, 3 drops of yellow - the point is DO NOT mix equal parts of each color and expect attractive results!
Here are some of the footballs and jerseys drying before I piped on the details. They didn't take very long to dry - by the time I finished spreading icing on all of the cookies and got the icing ready for piping the cookies iced first were almost dry.
Here are the finished cookies. Geaux Tigers!