Chocolate sugar cookies with bright royal icing.

The dough and royal icing recipes comes from the wondrous Joy of Baking site. We're using chocolate cookies as to get a dark backdrop for the Space Invaders dudes. This game is over 30 years old!

Ingredients:

2 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (two sticks) unsalted butter
1 3/4 cups granulated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Ingredients for Royal Icing:

4 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons meringue powder
1/2 cup warm water
Red, orange, green, etc. food colorings of your choice

Allow the butter to come to room temperature or soften it up in the microwave. You'll want it soft, but not melted. Blend in the sugar.

Butter and sugar; off to a good start.

Beat in the eggs and mix in the vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder.

This bowl wasn't quite big enough...

...I tried to be careful but a tiny bit of the dry mixture escaped anyway.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. This is going to make for a pretty thick dough. I added the dry mixture to my mixer and stirred slowly (the cocoa powder makes quite a cloud when stirred), then finished the mixing by hand because it was so thick.

Delicious dough!

If your dough is a little soft, pop in the fridge for about 30 minutes for it to harden. This will make it easier to work with when cutting out the shapes.

Once you're ready to cut out the circles, sprinkle out a little flour and roll out your dough so it's about 1/4 inch thick.

Using a circular cookie cutter, cut out the shapes and place on a cookie sheet. I used a larger cookie cutter so I could create larger space invaders on the cookies.

Pop into a a preheated 350F oven for 10-15 minutes.

Cool the cookies to cool.

Cookies awaiting to be iced.

For the royal icing, whisk together the powdered sugar and meringue powder.

Add warm water to the royal icing until it's smooth and glossy. You'll want it pretty thick so the Space Invader designs will hold their shape.

Spoon a few tablespoons – the amount depends on how many cookies of this color you'll want to frost – of the royal icing into a bowl. Add a drop of your color of choice and mix.

Love this bright color!

Scoop the colored royal icing into a plastic bag and seal. Snip the tip of the bag off.

Draw the Space Invader of your choice onto the cookie using the bag of royal icing and allow it to set. Because the icing is so thick, it'll be a few hours before it completely hardens.

Cookies with royal icing still setting.

Some Space Invaders.

Repeat with other colors and Invaders as your heart fancies.

Using 3" cookies, you'll get a little over two dozen chocolate cookies.

And some more Space Invaders!
Bigger image.