Sea Shell Sugar Cookies – Under The Sea Birthday Party

My little ballerina friend is turning 4 years old! She wanted a birthday party based around the sea as she was becoming very excited about their move to Guam this November. So it was Sea Shell Sugar Cookies, what else?

We received the cutest homemade fish invitation that Everly and her sister had made and hand delivered to us. She asked me to make some cookies for her birthday party. I shopped for “under the sea” cutters as this was going to my first attempt at underwater themed sugar cookies.

Coloring The Dough

Decorating sugar cookies with royal icing can be very time consuming and Im always searching for ways to make decorating easier. I thought that I would tint the dough a light yellow color to achieve the look of a chevron seashell. I added a yellow and brown food coloring and lightly kneaded the food coloring in to give the colors a swirl effect to the dough. Then I rolled the dough between wax paper. I cut out the shell shapes and pressed chevron shell ridges into the cookie with a back of a butter knife.

Still undecided as to how I was going to decorate the chevron cookies, I proceeded to make one batch of royal icing and split it into three colors; light blue, off-white and light sea-green in the “flooding” consistency for my first layer of frosting.

Icing Mistakes Gone Good!

My first few attempts were Just bad. I wish I had taken pictures. The chevron ridges weren’t apparent. I removed the frosting by scraping it off with the back of a butter knife, placing the frosting in another frosting bottle.

While I was placing the frosting back into the practice bottle, I glanced over at the “messed-up” cookies and was taken back for a moment. Apparently the “scrapping’ technique allowed the frosting to stay within the lines of the chevron ridges I made in the cookies highlighting them beautifully when the frosting was lightly removed! The cookie looked pretty cool like that. I picked up my bottle of “practice” frosting and attempted this “scrapping” technique again. Eureka!

Surprising Icing Success!

Using three different colors of royal icing, I squeezed out small dollops of each color onto the cookie. With a butter knife I lightly mix the colors together. Again, I removed some of the frosting and the mixture of the three colors made a more realistic looking sea shell color! I couldn’t believe it. How easy was this going to be? There was no flooding technique needed, nor removing of air bubbles. The Icing that was left from the previous cookie was spread onto the next cookie. It was so simple and realistic! The Sea shell sugar cookies were going to be a success!

I continued to embellished the cookies with little dots and sprinkles to give them a little more a 3-D effect.

Humbly, the cookies received rave reviews from the quests at the party. Haley and the girls loved them and I thought this Mistake turned out really nice.