Dirty's Little Secret Flippy Floppies!

I know it's December 7th and my last post was about Christmas cookies BUT I was just asked to make 50 Flip Flop cookies for A Gracious Event to promote Sandals Destination Weddings. Let me just say these were SOOO much fun to make! Dirty's First Personal Secret: I LOVE COLOR...the more the better! 

These Flippy Floppies were made from (as usual) my guru Martha Stewart's Classic Sugar Cookie Recipe.  Dirty's Secret is getting familiar with a recipe until you have it down to a science, after all practice makes perfect! 

This time around I decided to try an alternate recipe for Royal Icing. It used Meringue Powder instead of egg whites making it friendly for all you knocked up ladies out there! Let me get down to business....

Meringue Powder VERSUS Egg Whites  

Meringue Powder Positives: 

• Smells great
• Makes icing taste marshmellowy
• When mixed proportionately it will set rock hard so designs will not go Twilight Werewolf on you and imprint on something
• Good for making stiff royal icing for piping flowers or designs to be placed later on cookies.

Meringue Powder Negatives:

• Not easy to blend 
• Sometimes rock hard is TOO hard for an enjoyable cookie
• It's a lot more expensive than egg whites and you have to use A LOT to get a LITTLE icing! 

Egg White Positives:

• Easy to mix and very forgiving
• Eggs are always on hand incase you don't have meringue powder
• Great for "flooding" cookies

Egg White Negatives:

• Chance of food borne illness
• Messier than meringue powder (I'm talking about the separating of the white and yolk)
• Harder to achieve stiff piping 

So how did my meringue powder icing effect the Flip Flops? 

It may be hard to see from just a picture but this turquoise icing held a much thicker shape. After my first 4 cookies I had thin out the entire batch with water till it achieve a flooding consistency. 

NOW looking at the orange icing you can see it has a much glossier/wet sheen. I ended up adding TOO much water to the orange icing. The first three ended up running over...flooding in a bad way. 

Now to the fun part! The Flip Flops! 

These Flops are resting on a bed of faux sand aka brown sugar!

Don't you wish they made Flip Flops this cute that you could wear AND eat?

I hope these colors inspire warm thoughts of the Caribbean.

I'm not a fan of most 3-D movies, 60% of the time I think they are just doing it to make you have to pay more per ticket! However, I am a HUGE fan of this 3-D cookie :)

Sometimes they call me Dirty Pop...can you say Color Pop?!

Some of the luckier Flip Flops got decorative French Dragees they are oh-so-fancy and oh-so-fun! On the label it says for "Decoration Only" but if you research you will find if you eat them nothing will happen unless you're ingesting large quantities of them, therefore I do not suggest adding these to your daily diet! 

Little yellow fluffy goodness :) 

Once again 3-D cookies = awesome.

Note on the French Dragees...they look pretty but be careful they are hard like rock candy!

The final product wrapped and ready to go!

Dirty's Secret Confession: I'm stubborn and prefer to use egg whites, BUT I understand in order to sell large amounts to masses of people (cross my fingers) I need to perfect my meringue powder recipes! So in the world of egg whites vs. meringue powder I'll leave it to personal preference and if you are going to have a pregnant woman eating your icing :)