Puzzle Cake

Happy Birthday Mom!  I wanted to make a cookie creation as a gift for my mom for her birthday, so she was the inspiration for this project.  Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my mom was to put together puzzles while we watched our favorite tv shows and chatted.  Now that we don't live in the same house, we have puzzle swaps so that we can still enjoy the hobby.  A perfect personalized gift for my mom would be a sugar cookie puzzle cake.  It's quite an ambitious task, but to be cookie queen, I have to try everything right?

Before I started, I drew out a 12 piece puzzle on a piece of paper.  This is the template I would copy for the actual sugar cookies.  I halved a standard cookie dough recipe, rolled the dough out evenly onto an 8''X11'' cookie dough sheet so that it was about 1/2 inch thick, and I popped them in the oven.  I took the cookies out about 2 minutes before the the recipe called for them to be finished.  At this point, I took a sharp knife and copied my puzzle template by slowly tapping at the dough (instead of swiping straight), and removing any excess dough that stuck to the knife.

When I finished, I put the puzzle back in the oven to cook for the remaining 2 minutes.  At this point I found that the dough still looked too soft, so I left it in the oven for an extra 2 minutes.  Must have been because the dough was baking altogether, instead of in separate cookie cutter shapes.  Once the puzzle was out of the oven for good, I ran through the puzzle with my knife again, using the same tapping strategy, and I carefully separated the puzzle pieces.  This was a tough task.  Some of the edges looked jagged, so I used the knife to try to smooth out the edges as best I could.  I put the separated puzzle pieces in the freezer to cool for about an hour.

It was time for the icing.  I used egg whites, lemon juice, and confectioner's sugar.  I halved the icing into 2 bowls, putting purple food coloring in one and sugarless strawberry jam in the other.  I kept adding more and more jam into the one half until the color was just right.  It was super thin at this point.  Perfect, I thought, to paint on the base color with a basting brush.  The icing glided right on, smooth and thin, and I thought it would be perfect.  

I popped the cookies back in the freezer for the icing to dry.  One hour, still wet.  Two hours, still wet.  Three hours... midnight.... still wet.  It was time for bed.  It would have to dry by morning right?  Ten hours came and went and the icing never dried.  I focused too much on the color of the frosting and not enough on the consistency.  Next time I might use less jam and maybe the tiniest dot of red food coloring... or more confectioner's sugar... I'll figure that out later.  For now, I had to move forward.

The good news was that even though the icing never dried completely, it did dry enough to the point where it was just sticky.  I could still easily decorate over it.   I put the pieces back together (cutting the edges of some of the pieces so that it fit) and got to work with the purple icing. I used two tips to write happy birthday over the puzzle pieces, and create a flower border.  Since the pieces were still slightly spaced apart, I easily used a knife around the puzzle pieces to separate the wet purple icing that connected each piece.  

And voila! 

I knew it would be a difficult project to take on, and it was, but it was still a lot of fun.  The best part was when I gave it to my mom and I saw how much she loved it!