You’re Waffle Great!

Instructions

1. Prepare a batch of sugar cookies. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to about 1/2″ thick and cut out circles. Using a sharp, lightly floured knife, cut some circles in half, some in fourths, and leave others whole. Bake on parchment paper lined baking sheets for 7-9 minutes, or until no longer shiny. Allow to cool completely before icing.
2. Prepare a batch of royal icing to a 20 second icing consistency (a spoonful of icing dropped back into the bowl should take approximately 20 seconds to reabsorb fully). If you plan on doing the text, ice some of your cookies with white icing, shaking gently to fill in any divots.
3. Put a couple of spoonfuls of icing to the side. Tint the rest of the icing a light brown. Flood the remaining cookies completely with the brown icing. Cover the remaining brown icing and set aside.
4. Once the icing on the cookies has hardened, attach a #1 Wilton tip to a piping bag and fill with the leftover brown icing. Pipe around the outside of each cookie, double lines through the center, and then work your way across creating the squares of your waffles. If you plan on creating the text cookies, now would be the time to pipe your text. I used this technique from Sweet Ambs to help create a stencil for the text. Allow the icing to harden completely.
5. Using a small, food-only brush, work a little bit of baking cocoa in and around the base of the waffle squares. With a brown marker, draw a line on two of the sides in each square. This will give your cookies depth.
6. Tint the leftover spoonful or two of the white icing yellow. Pour it into a piping bag with a #1 Wilton tip, and pipe a “splash” of butter on your cookies. Allow to set a couple of minutes before going back over and create a little square of butter on top of the “splash.”