seven Ajah sugar cookies

The last few weeks of the quarter always have me over-scheduled to the hilt, so baking projects usually get put on the back burner. However, the debut of the Wheel of Time television show (based on the epic fantasy series of the same name) and my friend’s hosting of a WoTch party (see what he did there?) put me in the Spirit to get baking! So I Fired up the oven to make sugar cookies and decorate them for the party.

The cookie recipe is from the inimitable Rose Levy Beranbaum and her Rose’s Christmas Cookies book , which I checked out from the library. I was at first surprised by how few cookies I’d made (what you see is what I made - her recipe claimed it’d make four three dozen). But I rolled them out quite a bit thicker than she recommended because I don’t like crispy cookies.

The frosting is royal icing, which consists simply of egg whites, confectioner’s sugar, a little cream of tarter to keep is brilliant white, and in this case, lemon oil for a bit of flavor. I had to thin it out a bit with Water to get the consistency I wanted so I could pipe it with parchment cones I made before hand. I also tinted the royal icing with gel colors, having a bit of a mishap with a few of the colors (the one black cookie came about when I wasn’t immediately happy with the grey color and tried to fix it with yellow, which just turned it baby-poop-green, so I started dumping more and more black coloring in there until it turned the color you see here). The brown color was particularly beautiful, in its clean, Earth-tone. I didn’t have as much time to let the royal icing Air-dry as I might have liked, but they traveled well anyway!

So what’s with the design? Well, it’s not a comma or a sperm, but rather the Flame of Tar Valon, or the symbol of the White Tower and the Amyrlin Seat. And why the seven colors? Well, they represent each Ajah of course! Which one would you be? Gray, Green, Blue, Yellow, Red, Brown, or White?