ok, so i absolutly LOVE the look of iced sugar cookies but i just cant see how on earth i could possibly make money out of them due to the time they take to make. how do you all do it? do you buy loads of piping bags and loads of the same piping tips so you can have all the colours made up? do you get faster with practice?

i would really love to add cookies to my website, at the minute i just do 90% cakes and 10% cupcakes which take enough time!! but id love to do cookies for wedding favours.

also, how do you price cookies, i cant seem to work out how to price them for the time they take, also do you have minimum orders?....thanks in advance,

ps just bought mas cookie cutters to do some for myself and my hubby - so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't do the cookies to sell. I have done 100 decorated sugar cookies to give out as favors at an ICES Meeting, and done them as favors for a friend's wedding (about 150) They were basically only 1 or 2 colors, and I do own mulitple tips (I use PME 1.5).

After seeing what goes into making and decorating them, if I were to sell them, they would start at $3 a cookies for basic (one color) iced cookies. The price would go up per cookie based on the complexity of the design, since each color has to dry before you do the next, if there are multiple colors.

HTH,
Michelle

Thanks Michelle, i never pipe anything except cupcakes and only had a 1m tip which is a nightmare with more than one flavour so i just bought myself 3 1m, 3 1a, 3 no.6 and 3 no. 3 plain nozzles along with a few piping bags to give myself something to play with and also make my cupcaking easier. looking forward to trying some sugar cookies at christmas.

was thinking round the £2.00 mark myself for an iced cookie with one base colour and one other decorative colour.

am so excited at the thought of branching out

General rule of thumb for a basic cookie is $1/inch. So a cookie that was 3" tall and 4" wide would be $4.

Assembly line decorating is best. Yes, I have multiple bags/tips so I can just pick one up and go. Once you get into the swing of it, it goes pretty quick. Don't decorate one cookie at a time. Put the base color on ALL cookies. Then add the red outside border on ALL cookies. Then add the little flowers on ALL cookies. Assembly line, not piece work, is much faster.

If doing lots of cookies that have a single base color, I cut out fondant shapes and lay on the cookie while the cookie is still hot. Gently press down and the heat from the cookie melts the fondant onto the cookie. Doing it this way, I made three bouquets of 6 cookies each .... baked, decorated and packaged .... in less than an hour. This is SO fast!!!

Here's some fondant covered cookies: http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1363341

Here's some fondant covered cookies where I re-cut the cookie as soon as it came out of the oven, so the pre-cut fondant shapes fit PERFECTLY: http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1377393

thanks for the tips Indydebi - those pics are fab!! love the bouquets and yeah i think assembly line is definitly the way to go.....weirdly i was able to bake, ice and put flowers on, and box 90 cupcakes in about an hour longer than it takes me to do a batch of 12 im thiking i definitly need a minimum order though