Yes...

...I am still here. Also, yes, graduate school is going well. Down to my last semester and the fiery whirlwind that is student teaching: five days a week in the classroom of an experienced Japanese teacher who, to her great credit, has already demonstrated saintly patience by consenting to take me on in the first place*. I offer my advance apologies and well-wishes to both H-sensei and her classes; this will be a profound learning experience for me, and I sincerely beg for your forgiveness when the inevitable mistakes arise. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu. m(-_-)m

No, I am not entirely done with blogging forever. I am deeply enamored with Weebly for future online publications, however, and I'll be sure to let folks know when I start producing said publications again. (Hint: not likely until May.)

In the meantime, I wish you all a fortuitous beginning to 2014! Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu! May all of your own endeavors be successful and deeply satisfying, and your understanding of the universe only ever increase in wonder.

*... as have my two previous IMTs, although they only had to contend with my silliness one day of each week, which should technically have been 80% more manageable. Watakushi no sensei-tachi no mina-sama, itsumo o sewa ni narimashita yo! Made ganbatteimasu! ;_; 

"So a shishi walks into the graduate admissions office..."

(Stop me if you've heard this one before.)

I'm going to grad school, folks. Those of you who saw it coming six years ago, come up and claim your prize. I am, indeed, a born academic, and in the words of REO Speedwagon, "I can't fight this feelin' anymore."

Also in the words of REO Speedwagon, "I've seen hookers dancin' through Times Square with their heads held up so high." But that's another story. What was I going to say again?

Oh, yes: this does not mean the end of the blog. 

"Wait," said everyone, "you mean it's still going?"

Ku looked at Everyone with a tilt of her head. "What?"

"The blog," Everyone said, "Hadn't it already stopped long ago?"

"No," said Ku, visibly perturbed, "It never stopped, really.... I do come along every now and then and announce I'm alive, or encourage you to vote or something, don't I?"

"But you don't POST anything anymore," Everyone noted, "It's been ages since you've put up a new tutorial or photo... let's have a pattern, eh? Like the old days... like we used to."

"You would not believe the things I have on this side of the publish button," Ku replied with a thin smile and narrowed eyes, "Many things. Splendid things... but I will not reveal them until he time is right."

"And when should that be?" Everyone asked.

"Probably after I move into Ku House Tempe," Ku said, casually checking her watch to no benefit whatsoever, "sometime in the new year."

"Oh," said everyone, "damn."

So don't give up on me just yet. >:3

PS: Thank you for voting. :D

VOTE.

Dear US friends, if you have not voted already, GO DO IT NOW. This is your right, your responsibility, and your duty to your fellow citizens.

Whomever you support,

PLEASE VOTE.

Time is Running Out

Here it comes.

Oh boy...

Have you voted yet? :3

Color+: Hama Beads on Headphone Cable

I'm a sucker for color. Also for cheap projects and the peerless elegance of simplicity. This idea has 'em all.

Absolutely brilliant.

From Wooz.DK. Good show, Ms. Andersen.

Melts in Your Mouth, and Pretty Much Everywhere Else

I was going back through old things I had set up to post but didn't for some reason or another and I found this. Nikki sent me a most generous package earlier this summer, and I am still at a loss for how I can ever fulfill my debt of awesome and interesting things to her.

The Astounding Nikki, who I fear shall be an expat forever more, always sends me astounding things. Sometimes those astounding things are made of chocolate, a medium I hold in very high esteem. Delicious esteem, you might say. The local climate, however, is less... uh... respectful.

stock photo of the delicious and delightful "Happy Egg" of Great Britain that Nikki so thoughtfully sent me

aftermath of mailing a Happy Egg to the Arizona desert

I am pleased to report that in any physical format, Happy Eggs are delicious! Furthermore, their twee little faces, even when melted to the window of their packaging, remain perfectly adorable. The outcome of posting chocolate through the desert has never been more endearing (or more comedic) in my humble opinion.

For this and all other delights you send me, Astounding Nikki, please accept my sincere gratitude. I am without the means to thank you properly unless you should need a kidney someday. c:

Eventful Day

Well shit, this has been a busy Monday. Let's see:

✓ Land a nuclear rover on Mars
✓ Remember Hiroshima 67 years after the first atomic bombing
✓ Hey Jamaica, happy Independence Day
✓ Hey Jamaican, you're the Fastest Man on Earth
✓ Apply to grad school

Yep.

Oh yeah, and I know what I want for Christmas this year:

I will drive it around my desk with a 20 minute contact delay for added realism.

So I'm going to start writing this blog again, but it's going to be decidedly different. I was trying to do just the artsy-crafty stuff here, but then I ran out. ._. So now I'll just post everything. `u` フフフぅ〜

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

<Ku anger ENGAGED>

Suckah redirecting from mah blog just bettah step the HELL back. 

I ain't done here, no GOT-DAM way.

<Ku reset>

To anyone recently visiting who was redirected to some asshat's placeholder, I do apologize. A javascript installed from a Japanese page was corrupted when that J-page got hacked... so no more little ghostie on the sidebar. :<

Also, I am still alive. :3

You stopped SOPA; you stopped PIPA!

Thank you, everyone. The Internet is safe for now, but there remains much to be done.

Don't back down. Keep the pressure on your representatives in Congress, and spread the word. SOPA and PIPA (and ACTA, an international agreement that is slowly evolving into similar legislation) are still on the table, and they'll be back. 

Stop SOPA. Stop PIPA.

This post will remain, long after the blackouts of January 18th have come and gone.


SOPA and PIPA are closely-related bills in the US legislature that, if passed, will cripple the Internet. They are scheduled to go up for a vote on January 24th.

This is not a drill.


Google: End Piracy, Not Liberty: sign the petition
StopTheWall.us: protest about PIPA directly to your senator

Learn about the bills (SOPA, PIPA) and make yourself heard.

WARNING: blog has reached critical mass

Alright, damnitall, here we go:

I need to get my online data organized. First off is this blog, which IS still alive, honestly. It's connected to my private account and a webspace where I host designs for clients, though, which is less than optimal. Also, it is ugly. I can't design the space here the way I'd like to without circumventing a bunch of Blogger rules and garbage. Vehement MEH.

SO, with everyone's merciful understanding and forgiveness, please know that things are going to go royally haywire for a little while. I intend to leave everything up and accessible for as long as I can, and I will make any hot switches in the shortest length of time possible. That said, there are going to be broken links here and there. In the end, things should seamlessly redirect to wherever I decide to drop them for permanence... fingers crossed.

In the process, I will be permanently deleting some posts. These will generally be the posts that have nothing of interest to anyone, anywhere, anyway. (All the "oh crap what happened let me fix this sorry brb" posts, for example.) Anything that contains a pattern, tutorial, or experiment will remain online and fully accessible by the end of the cleanup. The current links to PDF patterns and diagrams, however, will break. I intend to replace them with a forwarding image.

Lastly, I will establish a secondary blog for some of the things that I would have previously posted here. I think. Maybe. Let me think it over. (If you're only here for patterns, don't worry; you'll still be in the right place.)

Postscriptively, happy new year to everyone. :3 I hope you've all had a great first week.

Damnitall.

Something snapped in the overburdened monstrosity of a template I have been using on this blog for a long time, so MEH. I intend to redesign the whole thing this weekend.

...and then post new stuff.

Don't be afraid of any weird errors you see here for the next however many days, thanks. m(-_-;)m

Zzzzzzz...

....zzzzzzz....



...GAH! WHA! WHA?!

WHERE AM I
WHAT MONTH IS IT
OH CR*P I AM WAY BEHIND ON EVERYTHING

Translation: I am both lazy AND I have been sick, and I really need to update. Sorry. Stay tuned.

What the Felt (or, good places to buy wool felt online)

I'm shopping for felt. This is what I do to relax after utterly failing to make chicken stir-fry (apparently).

Also, I find it soothing to write reports comparing the online retailers of products for which I shop after utterly failing to make chicken stir-fry.

Yep.

I rated these on a less-than-scientific system, mind you; most of these players sell a wide variety of sizes and blends, but I make small stuff and I don't need 100% virgin unicorn wool. Ergo, the target is for the smallest piece for sale with one dimension of at least 12", with a blend of minimum 20% wool.

The Felted Ewe

Colors: 26
Wool percentage: 20% ~ 35% wool to rayon
  Thickness: unknown
  Size: 12" by 18"
  Price: $1.35 each
     Per square inch: $0.0063
Shipping: $7.00 US, more international

Commonwealth Felt

Colors: 60+
Wool percentage: 20% ~ 35% to rayon, 100% wool and bamboo/rayon available
  Thickness: unknown
  Size: 12" by 18" (and 36" by 36")
  Price: $1.79 for 20%, $1.89 for 35% ($9.39 for square yard of either)
     Per square inch: $0.0083 for 20%, $0.0088 for 35%
Shipping: $8.15 and up

Weir Crafts

Colors: 15
Wool Percentage: 70% to rayon, 100% wool and 50% bamboo/rayon available
  Thickness: 1/16"
  Size: 9" by 12" (larger sizes available)
  Price: $1.75 each
     Per square inch: $0.0162
Shipping: $4.99 and up

Erica's

Colors: ~90
Wool Percentage: 20%, 35%, and 70% to rayon, 100% wool on same page
  Thickness: 1/16" for rayon blends, 7/64" for 100%
  Size: 9" by 12" (larger sizes available)

  Price: ranges from $1.05 to $1.50 based on color and blend, $2.15 for 100%
Shipping: ~$3.00+, varies widely depending upon size of order

Wool Felt Central

Colors: 98
Wool Percentage: 20% ~ 35% to rayon
  Thickness: 1/16" for rayon blends, 7/64" for 100%

  Size: 12" by 18" or by the yard (continuous)

  Price: $1.75 each, $8.50 per yard for 20%, $9.50 per yard for 35%
Shipping: $5.99+

Other Places to Find Felt
I didn't do the math for these: they were either too jumbled up, too expensive (but still pretty to look at), obvious places to look, or temporarily closed (Felt-o-rama will re-open in January 2012).

Colonial Crafts
A Child's Dream
Create for Less
Felt-o-rama

AND NOW I WILL EAT MY SAD CHICKEN STIR-FRY AS PENANCE. (〒д〒)

Experiment: A Mess (Poured Fondant)

My sister needed to bake up some cookies to send to a friend, so I suggested a method of decorating that I'd wanted to try for some time now: poured fondant. It is, in essence, the same thing as glace icing, but instead of adding more liquid, you heat it up juuust a little to get the sugar to a liquid state, then beat the mixture briefly to force the recrystallization of the sugar to remain fine and even. This supposedly allows you to simply pour it over whatever baked good you're trying to decorate for a solid, even layer. It sets quickly by cooling, then locks into a matte sugar shell within 24 hours.

The recipe is fantastically simple:

6 cups confectioner's sugar
1/2 cup water
2 Tablespoons light corn syrup
1~2 teaspoons extract flavoring as desired
food coloring as desired

Mix everything in a pot over low heat to 92~100 degrees F, pour over something edible.

Here's the mixing...

 ...and, uh... the aftermath of the pouring.  

Disclaimer: Those cookies with clean-cut edges in the back of the image were achieved by literally carving them out of a sheet of hardened fondant sludge.

In brief, this is a hard process to control. Even with twice the water called for in the recipe and increasing the temperature all the way to 105 degrees F, the fondant was never thin enough to really pour over the cookies. It was more like laying down sugary tarp that kinda draped over the sides of each cookie and made indistinct sugary lumps of all of them. I'm not quite sure why this happened, but I suspect either the distinct lack of humidity in the desert or the cheap confectioner's sugar I picked up at Walmart is to blame.

One more try, dipping the cookies into the fondant while keeping it over steady low heat. They do this with cupcakes, the Internet tells me.

what the Internet tells me

real life*

...dipping 0.25" thick cookies into hot sugar sludge = not the most fun thing ever. SIGH.

Maybe I'll make petit fours someday, but I won't revisit poured fondant until then.

This will be my last attempt at decorated cookies for a while as I get back to posting patterns I have neglected for a long time.

* I really wanted to photoshop David DeVore into that image, but alas, I have neither the time nor the skills.

Experiment: Stamped Impression Cookies

Short one. To decorate cookies with a full coat of icing, you usually do it in two steps. First, piping, where you go around the edges with a line of icing that is thick enough to not flow off the edge of the cookie, then let it set up before step two, flooding, where you fill the outlined area(s) with an icing that is slightly thinner.

example of piped icing on cookies, before the flooding step (hands and creativity provided by my sister)

Piping exists entirely as a series of dams to keep the flood icing from overflowing the sides of the cookie. There are, conceivably, many other ways of setting up these dams. For example, what happens if you press foam stamp shapes into soft cookie dough, bake it, then fill the impressions with glace icing? Do the walls of the indentations work as well as piped borders to hold the shape of the icing?

Conclusion: Yes. Yes they do.

Additionally, chocolate sugar cookie dough offers many creative avenues worth perusal. :D

Yes, it is a poo cookie. No, I am not ten years old.

Experiment: Glace Icing (and a Lecture)

Not satisfied in the least with the outcome of the last experiment, I have been puttering around on the Internet in search of an alternative method of decorating cookies with hard icing... and wouldn't you know it, there IS one. Lads and ladies, glace icing:

The Crafty Penguin

Drakegore on Flickr

Drakegore on Flickr

Glace icing is similar to royal icing in that it hardens atop cookies, so it's good for fine decorating and making treats that have to survive transit. Unlike royal icing, it does not require egg whites or meringue powder, so it doesn't taste like you were baking in the forge at a tin mill. Which is nice.

this is nasty stuff

SO HERE GOES THE EXPERIMENT PART AGAIN

I made some more cookies, same recipe as before. Then I got a recipe for glace icing from here, with alterations. There seems to be several variations among professional bakers as to which are the correct alchemical elements in this concoction. There's a general consensus on the confectioner's sugar, corn syrup, and your choice of clear flavored extract. Then, a division: milk or water? And, if milk: whole or skim?

OH GOD SO MANY CHOICES

I can't think of why you'd want to use whole milk in any recipe that doesn't specifically rely on the fat content, and as far as making a sugar-based icing that you intend to set hard, fats and oils of any kind would likely sabotage the effort.

Water offers a unique benefit. The other three ingredients in glace icing are all shelf-stable, meaning they can be left at room temperature in closed containers and will not rot. Using water as the final ingredient maintains this property, rendering an icing that can essentially go in the pantry for weeks (perhaps even months?) in a sealed bottle and be used as needed.

I chose skim milk for this first try, for reasons explained further down the page. There is another decision to be made; how to color the icing?

WHY IS THIS SO HARD

...actually, it's not that hard. The liquid food coloring that you buy at the supermarket is the cheapest and most widely-available food dye out there, and it's likely something you've worked with before at kindergarten or in your mom's kitchen. You can also find more concentrated food dyes at specialty shops (and most craft stores, nowdays, since boutique baking has exploded into a billion dollar industry with TV shows and designer brands of icing and tools and competitions with celebrity judges and... wait, am I still in the parentheses?)

Eh-hem. Concentrated food dyes come in two types: gel and paste. There are several brands available, including Wilton, Ateco, and AmeriColor. Both are generally more expensive than liquid dyes. 

Now, the sneaky insight part of this post, AKA why I went to college: knowing the nature of your available mediums can help you cheat at achieving bright color.

OH NO A LONG EXPLANATION

Every coloring medium falls somewhere on a spectrum of transparency. At one end, you have translucence; inks and dyes that add their color on top of any colors already present. This is like adding a wash of blue watercolor to black text on a white page -- the white takes on the blue hue, while the black text remains fully visible and unaffected. No matter how many times you wash the page with blue, the black test isn't going to be covered -- you will only supersaturate the page with blue until it reaches the maximum available hue of the ink.

On the other end of the spectrum is opacity. Opaque inks and other mediums have the additional property of coverage. When applied to a page, a completely opaque medium will blot out any colors underneath and fill the area with its own exact color. If you applied an opaque coat of blue paint to the white page of black text mentioned above, you would simply end up with a blue sheet of paper -- both the text and the white background would be gone. No matter how many coats of blue opaque paint you used, however, the hue will not increase in saturation, as it would with a translucent dye; you would be unable to change the value of the one blue shade your paint produced with the first coat.

Applied to coloring foodstuffs, here's the trick: liquid and gel food dyes fall on the translucent end of the spectrum, but pastes fall on the opaque side. (Skim milk (remember?) is also highly opaque.) Glace icing itself is semi-translucent and will not provide an opaque "ground" for brighter colors to "stand" on. If you use add some white food coloring paste to your icing, you are infusing the icing with this necessary ground, which means you can get away with using the cheaper translucent liquid food dyes to achieve your full spectrum of color. Using skim milk (rather than water) in the composition of the icing further enhances this opaque white ground quality.

Holy crap, that was verbose. o.o' Sorry.

Short version: 

To get bright colors with minimal investment in specialty food dyes, use about 10~20 drops of white paste food dye when you mix up a batch of icing, then divide and color it with regular liquid dyes from the supermarket. (You can always invest in a full spectrum of pastes and gels later if you decide colored icing is your calling in life.)

SO THAT IS WHAT I DID, with American "bright white" paste found at the Hobby Lobby* up in Phoenix.

Outcome:

Woot, b*tches!

Conclusions

Glace icing tastes GOOD. Not as good as buttercream icing (frosting), that soft stuff on cakes that I could eat by the spoonful (and have, on occasion), but glace is dramatically better than royal icing. If I could fault it for anything, it'd be that it's on the upper edge of tolerable sweetness... but paired with a crisp buttery cookie, this works to the sum benefit of both.

Glace icing is easy to make. Four ingredients, none of them exotic, no need for an appliance beater or special paddles, no time limits. Also can be made to last weeks without refrigeration if you use water in place of milk and keep it in sealed containers. You can't beat that.

Glace icing hardens exactly well enough. It takes a drying time of 24 hours (or more, for thick icing on big cookies), but glace does reach a point of stability beyond which it can be stacked, packaged, and mailed (by parcel post, even). It does NOT become crystalline-hard, like royal icing. One thing you need to be careful about is letting the piped outline set up before flooding the interior...and glace icing tends to form lower barriers, so don't overfill:

Oops.

...but also, don't underfill, because glace icing sinks as it dries. This didn't seem to be as much of a problem the first time I made it with skim milk, but subsequent batches made with water seem to sink down in the middle. I'm still hoping to figure out if the water is really the culprit, or if it has something to do with the dry atmosphere to be found in any kitchen in the Arizona desert (4% relative humidity, woah).

Glace icing tends to blur a little at the edges between colors. Both milk and water recipes showed this effect... it's like a 2-pixel feathering, if you're familiar with photo editing software. Again, this might be caused by my own inexperience at the technique, the weather conditions in Arizona, alignment of the planets, or butterflies flapping their wings in Africa. Or it could just be intrinsic to glace icing.

High-gloss only. The corn syrup, an integral ingredient for stability of the icing as it is applied to the cookies, gives glace an inherently shiny finish. This is the exact opposite of the flat, solid look of royal icing. Not too much of a price to pay for the improvement in flavor and ease of production, but it means that desirable hard shell of matte candy color remains out of my reach... for now.

Aaaand that's the end of that particular experiment, thought I am still making cookies and glace icing. Like I mentioned up there somewhere, these iced cookies ship well, and I can't think of anyone in my book of addresses who could not use some cookies right about now. (Honestly; can you?)

*Hey Hobby Lobby: please build a freakin' store in Tucson already.

Still Alive

(...and still channeling Gladys after a weekend of Portal 2 jokes with my sister.)

That Which Has Been Going On:

• a second iced-cookie experiment, now with 200% more success and zero meringue powder*
• further experiments with surplus craft supplies (and further cementing my hatred of painting things)*
• using the Internet to solve my problems, like old cellphones and random collectibles from childhood, both of which help ease my insatiable desire to visit the post office every day
• rigging up an Etsy shop (!)

* post coming soon

Experiment: Royal Icing

Damn you, cookies. Damn your delicious siren song. Curse your versatility, an appropriate snack for all ages and all venues, from after-school munch to high tea presentables. Most of all, your glorious presentation under coats of delicate icing; your transformation from flat crunchy biscuit to a perfectly appointed treat for the eyes as well as the tongue, sweet and tempting...

Damn it all, I gotta try this.

Between my sweet tooth and the books at the library, the call of the decorated cookie has been too much for me to ignore this spring. I usually make cookies from the "drop" family; that is, drop spoonfuls of dough on the cookies sheet, bake, cool, eat. Chocolate chip cookies are the most famous member of this family; so are snickerdoodles, most cookies involving peanut butter, or any chunky cookies full of nuts, candy, dried berries, oats, etc.

But I digress.

To make the sugar-shelled glory of finely decorated cookies, you need to start with a flat, clean canvas of rolled-and-cut cookies, and develop your decorations around the medium of royal icing; that mysterious sugary paste that requires unfamiliar powdered egg ingredients. Beyond the gingerbread cookie recipe I inherited from my mother, I have very little experience with rolled cookies. I have exactly ZERO experience with royal icing. However THIS:

O.O !!!

"now with more sparkles!"

Dood. Ornithology and sugar? I'm in.

...is inspiration far more powerful than I can resist. So I got me a book and a canister of meringue powder and READY SET GO.

This book (above right), which was available at the library, is actually the Xmas special edition of the other book (above left), which was not, but will be shortly, because I requested it through interlibrary loan and the Empress of Librarians was all "hey, that's a cool book" and she ordered some copies for Pima county yaaay. :D

I'm not going to detail the recipe and making of the cookies in the book, because it's not my recipe and pretty much a moot point. You can make any cookie as a base for decorating so long as it possesses two particular qualities: flat and stiff. Crunchy butter cookies or hard gingerbread; that sort of thing. The book has recipes for butter sugar cookies, butter chocolate cookies, and gingerbread. I made the butter sugar cookies.

NOW HERE IS THE EXPERIMENT PART:

Royal Icing

The unique chemical nature of this stuff made me apprehensive about it's creation, but if you measure carefully and follow directions, it seems to come out more or less as it should be on the first try. One thing I have learned regarding the use of royal icing on cookies is that it needs to be made in two formats; piping and flood.

Piping is the stiffer stuff that keeps more of its shape and dries harder. It can be used in several ways, but for this elementary experiment, it's basically what you use to draw outlines of different areas you want to color. It is the "pen" of cookie illustration.

Flood icing has the same components as piping icing, but a higher ratio of water. Ergo, it flows a little more freely. Once you've drawn all the outlines you want with piping icing, you fill in the spaces with flood icing. It hits the piped borders and stops, giving an effect like cloisonne work. You can also add flood icing of different colors on top of a flooded background; it will sink in to the same blob, you can swirl the colors together for cool effects (called "feathering", I think).

ancient enameling technique compared to modern cookie (yep)

The other thing I have learned about royal icing is that its key ingredient is egg albumen, and that this can be supplied in one of at least three ways: liquid pasteurized egg whites, powdered egg whites, and meringue powder. A fourth way (zeroith way?) is just using egg whites that you separate from regular ol' whole eggs you get from a chicken or the store, but this carries a risk of salmonella, so don't do it and then blame me when you get sick.

I couldn't find powdered egg whites anywhere in town, and I didn't want to measure out liquid egg whites, so for convenience, I chose to use meringue powder. Maybe a bad choice on my part, since it makes things taste tinny and kinda bitter.

(I will not use this again.)

Now I am going to put down the recipe for royal icing -- using meringue power -- as provided in the book, specifically because THERE IS AN ERROR IN IT. A quick look around the Internet establishes that several bakers have identified a typo whereby "teaspoons" was accidentally replaced by "tablespoons" in the measurement of meringue powder. The publisher has acknowledged the mistake and will supposedly correct it in future reprints. In the meantime:

Here is the correct recipe for royal icing, adapted from the book Cookie Craft Christmas:

For Piping
2 cups confectioners' sugar (1/2 pound)
4 teaspoons meringue powder
3 tablespoons of warm water*
1 tablespoon lemon juice OR 1/2 to 1 teaspoon flavored extract

For Flooding
2 cups confectioners' sugar (1/2 pound)
4 teaspoons meringue powder
6 tablespoons of warm water*
1 tablespoon lemon juice OR 1/2 to 1 teaspoon flavored extract

*Notice that the amount of water is the only difference between piping and flooding icing.

"Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat on high speed with an electric mixer, 5 to 10 minutes or until icing reaches desired consistency. Store in airtight containers when not in use."

SO HERE IS WHAT I DID:

I put the piping icing, which I left white, in a quart Ziploc bag (thick freezer type) and cut a tiny hole in one tip to make a ghetto decorating bag. The flood icing went into three sammich bags along with some 5 to 15 drops of standard cheapo grocery store food coloring in each, which I then squished around in the sealed bags to color the stuff three ways: yellow, pink, and light green. I later added a darker green to the originally light green icing bag, making a darker green fourth color.

AND HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED:

...hmm.

Conclusions

I cannot pipe royal icing worth a crap. In hindsight, this is because I made the rookie mistake of putting the tip of the icing bag against the cookie when squeezing out the icing. The correct way, apparently, is to "drape" the icing, holding the tip of the bag an inch or two above the cookie and allowing the string of icing to hang down, directing where it falls to make your shapes. So... yeah. Learning process. -_-; (You are supposed to put the tip of the bag against the cookie when adding flood icing, however.)

Meringue powder tastes bad. After the icing dried on the cookies, they actually tasted rather decent and lemony. The frosting alone, however, is bleh. Even though they contained the same ratio of sugar and meringue powder to flavoring, the piping icing was considerably less offensive than the flood icing. I can only assume the addition of more water in the flood icing causes a different reaction with the meringue powder. If I ever try royal icing again, I will use pasteurized egg whites.

Liquid food coloring is for pastel colors only. If you want strong colors, get paste colors in the little jars. It simply takes too much liquid coloring to get any considerable color at all, and you'll end up changing the consistency of the frosting with all those little drops.

Ziploc baggies are not equivalent to decorator bags. The quart bag worked admirably, but my control over the flow of the icing was poor compared to the control I could have gotten with a coupler and a few decorating tips. One of the sammich bags had a blow-out, taking out a few cookies with a sudden flood of squishy icing. Decorating bags are not expensive, but the cheapskate in me wants to try this technique before I spring for a pack of plastic cones. It's apparently a tried-and-true pro technique to fold baking parchment to make one's own disposable paper cones for frosting, and heaven knows I'm a nerd for folding paper. :D

Extra piping icing (and to a lesser extent, flood icing) can be used to make fancy tea sugars. Run out of cookies, but still have icing? It can last a while in the fridge in sealed containers, but it'll start to separate after a few days. You can use leftover icing to practice your decorating technique on wax paper or bakers' parchment, leave the sugary scribbles to dry overnight, and then use them like large, misshapen sugar cubes in your tea or coffee. As a bonus, the meringue flavor pretty much vanishes when dissolved in coffee or stronger tea.

Tea sugars! Fancy ones!

And that's the end of that experiment... but not of my lust for cookies. I can imagine I'll be back on this track someday. In the meantime, anybody want a tin of meringue powder? <:P