Kohakutou Cookies

This is what I made last year. I decorated cookies with royal icing and kohakutou. ("kohaku" means amber, and "tou" means sugar in Japanese.) 

We use sea weed powder called kanten that is common in Japan, but people outside Japan seem to use agar. (I hear using agar will make kohakutou clearer. There are already a lot of kohakutou recipes in English out there on the internet, like this.
 

I made two sets of kohakutou cookies. For the first one I used kohakutou as crystals with succulent plants.




After kohakutou was dry, I applied a little bit of silver luster dust dissolved in vodka.
 

To pipe succulent plants, I used these tips(nozzles):

-a mystery 13 star tip(nozzle), which has no brand name. It is just a little smaller than the Marpol 14 star tip.

-PME42 rope tip

-Marpol 101S rose tip


I use a few different shades to pipe them, such as light purple and grayish green. You can see how I put different shades of icing in my piping cone here.

 

The white tiny dots are white food colouring added with the tip of a scriber. The cookie in the photo below was 6.5cm.



 

The reason why the cookie dough is pink is because I had some leftover pink dough from a cream cheese tart I made for my daughter's birthday...

 

(This type of cake is called "Desperately Cute Tart" in Japanese.)


For the second set, I used kohakutou as jewels.

Those kohakutou were quite small and had a large amount of crystallization, which makes them look whitish (not clear).

I don't particularly like the texture of kohakutou but it's okay with cookies if they are small pieces.

One thing you need to be noted is that kohakutou is moist even after its surface is completely dry. You can't keep cookies with kohakutou so long as cookies decorated with just royal icing. Probably you should eat them within a week.