Anyone have any secrets to getting a good, thick coating of powdered sugar on a cookie?  I’m thinking that mixing some amount of viscous substance in the powdered sugar must be helpful in getting it to stick.

Do you mean dry powdered sugar or an icing made with powdered sugar?

Hmmm, maybe coating the cookie with a thin glaze of something, like egg white or heated apricot jam or cornstarch glaze?  If you make your own powdered sugar in a grinder or food processor, it won’t have the added cornstarch and might be stickier.

What are you making?  Love to hear the details.

Patrincia - 23 February 2009 06:29 AM

Do you mean dry powdered sugar or an icing made with powdered sugar?

Dry confectioner’s sugar.

Julie - 23 February 2009 07:14 AM

What are you making?  Love to hear the details.

I didn’t want to bore you.    I’m making (did make) lemon coolers from the King Arthur’s Cookie book.  They recommend letting the cookies cool 5 min before rolling them; other place I read that it’s important to roll them while hot.  Howeve, these cookies are fragile when right out of the oven.  (Interestingly, they contain no egg, but do contain cream cheese.)

There isn’t a lot of sugar in the cookies themselves, and much of the lemon flavor is on the sugar coating, so it’s important to have a good layer, or you just get not real sweet cookie.

Thanks

I’m thinking of applying either a lemon-flavored syrup or lemon glaze to the exterior and rolling the cookie in powdered sugar before it’s dry.  Does that seem like a reasonable idea?  The syrup would reduce the quantity of powdered sugar that would be necessary on the exterior and I might be able to intensify the lemon flavor, too.

Or maybe you could sift some coating over the cookies while they are hot, to get a nice sticky layer of sugar mixed with melted butter, then roll them when they are firm enough.

Cathy

Both ideas sound good, though now that I think about it, the glaze might dull any crispness of the outside of the cookie (is it a crisp cookie?).

Let us know how it turns out!

CharlesT - 23 February 2009 07:23 PM

I’m thinking of applying either a lemon-flavored syrup or lemon glaze to the exterior and rolling the cookie in powdered sugar before it’s dry.

If you do that, the glaze will melt the powdered sugar.  You have to apply powdered sugar to a cool, dry surface.

cdurso - 24 February 2009 11:56 PM

Or maybe you could sift some coating over the cookies while they are hot, to get a nice sticky layer of sugar mixed with melted butter, then roll them when they are firm enough.

Which raises another thought….mix up a little butter with the powdered sugar?

Julie - 25 February 2009 08:53 AM

Both ideas sound good, though now that I think about it, the glaze might dull any crispness of the outside of the cookie (is it a crisp cookie?).!

No, it’s not crisp at all; the recipe says “melts in your mouth”.  Not quite that, but it is soft.

CharlesT - 25 February 2009 08:02 PM

cdurso - 24 February 2009 11:56 PM

Or maybe you could sift some coating over the cookies while they are hot, to get a nice sticky layer of sugar mixed with melted butter, then roll them when they are firm enough.

Which raises another thought….mix up a little butter with the powdered sugar?

That will make more of a paste than a powdery coating.  Try this - submerge your barely warm cookies in a bowl of powdered sugar and just leave them in there for a while.  Check them after 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, etc, until you get the desired amount of sugar to stick.  If the cookies are too warm, the sugar will melt and disappear, but if they’re just barely warm, with just the tiniest bit of slightly moist residual heat, that should permeate the powdered sugar and make it a bit more thick or clumpy (for lack of a better word) without making it melt.

Patrincia - 25 February 2009 12:33 PM

If you do that, the glaze will melt the powdered sugar.  You have to apply powdered sugar to a cool, dry surface.

Everything I’ve Googled says you want to powder the cookies when they’re hot, because you want the sugar to melt a bit.  However, I do see that sugar melts at 295 degrees F, so I’m not quite sure the cookies themselves are that hot.  Perhaps the sugar is just slightly dissolving in the surface of the cookie?

Even so, the glaze isn’t nearly that hot.  I experimented a bit with corn syrup and the idea seems to work, even though corn syrup is a bit too viscous.

I’m sorry… I missed the earlier post where you mentioned what kind of cookies you were making.  Yes, in this case it sounds like maybe you’re not letting the cookies sit in the powdered sugar long enough.

Patrincia - 25 February 2009 08:15 PM

What kind of cookies are we talking about here?

“Lemon Coolers” from King Arthur’s Cookie Companion.  They contain cream cheese and no eggs.  They are *very* tender.  The one cookie I picked up after baking fell apart, which is why I suspect that the recipe says wait 5 minutes.

CharlesT - 25 February 2009 08:18 PM

Patrincia - 25 February 2009 08:15 PM

What kind of cookies are we talking about here?

“Lemon Coolers” from King Arthur’s Cookie Companion.  They contain cream cheese and no eggs.  They are *very* tender.  The one cookie I picked up after baking fell apart, which is why I suspect that the recipe says wait 5 minutes.

Yep, cookies continue to cook for several minutes after they come out of the oven.  They’re really not structurally sound until that “carry over cooking time” has elapsed.