Cookie secrets yield sweet success

By Laura Tonkyn, Journal staff Thursday, December 20, 2007 RAPID CITY - There is sure to be a yummy array of gingerbread, brownies, spritz, Mexican wedding cookies and more -- much more -- on holiday cookie trays this year. But for many bakers, the tray isn’t complete without some beautifully decorated cutouts – the stars, ornaments, bells and snowflakes created from a favorite sugar cookie recipe. It’s a time-consuming process – making and cutting out cookies -- and that’s not counting the patient hours of painting on the decorative frosting. Recently, Connie Suto, a Rapid City restaurateur and master baker, showed a roomful of baking students at Someone’s In the Kitchen how to make sure the long hours of baking result in stunning holiday cookies. Suto’s cake and cookie expertise, along with her delicious luncheon menus, have been bringing customers to her Mount Rushmore Road eatery, Piece of Cake, for 2-1/2 years. And 16 years ago, it was cake design that provided her a start in the business. “I used to sell insurance, and my mom brought in a cake,” she said. “A gentleman saw it and wanted us to do his wedding cake.” Soon Suto was baking cakes for the man’s friends, and her business grew from there. Suto grew up on a ranch west of Hermosa, and cooking was always part of the rural lifestyle. As a young woman, Suto discovered she enjoyed artistic activities such as watercolor painting. “For me to design cakes is just natural,” she said. “It all comes together. I always loved to cook and make people happy.” Today, Suto bakes and designs cakes for about 150 weddings a year, plus many other celebration cakes. It’s her sister, Karen Heinrichs, who bakes most of the cookies at Piece of Cake. But Suto has lots of cookie know-how herself. “A key to sweet stuff is using pure vanilla,” she said. “Once you are used to that, artificial makes things taste yucky.” Suto says she uses real butter, fresh ingredients and pure extracts in the roll-out sugar cookie dough used for the holiday cut-outs. The dough should be between 1/8- and ¼-inch thick, and when baked, should be slightly brown around the edges. “It has to be sturdy enough to hold the icing,” she said. “And it has to taste good and look good.” Suto’s cookies have a special ingredient that makes them taste particularly good – but that’s a trade secret, she said. When measuring the flour, spoon into a cup and level with a knife. Don’t compact it by tapping or packing. And don’t overmix the dough, Suto added. “Incorporate your flour, then stop mixing.” When rolling out the dough, take the scraps and add them to a new piece of dough. The unbaked cookies should be placed on an aluminum pan, never a dark pan. “Insulated pans are great,” Suto said, because they brown evenly. For cakes, and for cookies, too, an inserted toothpick should come out with crumbs on it. “If your toothpick comes out dry, your cake is dry,” Suto said. In her cookie class, Suto used Royal Icing for decorating. “We use it on these particular cookies because of the pulling technique,” she said. Buttercream icing is likely more flavorful, according to Suto, but does not have the decorating ease. A good number of people give up on decorating cookies because they start with store-bought frosting. “It has horrible results,” she said, adding that a poor outcome is likely caused by wrong tools and wrong products. Proving her point, the results were amazingly fine at the cookie class Suto taught. Each student used three decorator bags of Royal Icing, one white, one dyed green and one dyed red. Each also was provided with a fat tip, two thinner tips and a supply of toothpicks. The fat tips were used to fill in the background of each cookie with white frosting, while the thinner tips were used with the red and green bags to begin the design work. After a line of colored frosting was squeezed onto the filled-in cookie, the toothpicks were used to “pull” the line into beautiful patterns. There was a festive spirit as the class worked on their cookies, with some students showing amazed pride at the successful outcomes. “What’s great about it is that everybody’s cookie looks different,” Suto said after the class. “There are always some people who are very artistic. They try it my way, then they do something different.” Once students learn the basic techniques, Suto encourages them to experiment with different colors and patterns. She does advise a little caution. “Cookies can be complex. People start with too much and can get overwhelmed. Start with the very basic and get very beautiful cookies,” she said. But her class is really about giving people the tools to free up their Christmas creativity. “A lot of people come in skeptical and think they will be bad,” she said. “We prove them wrong.”