Mice and Swiss Cheese Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing Glaze

A friend of mine bought the sweetest little mouse cutter for me so of course I had to make cookies for her.

These mice are supposed to have cute little tails.  Unfortunately they were lost in some horrible dough / cookie cutter accidents.  I just couldn't get them to release from the cutter without breaking!  I almost scrapped the whole project, then decided to just pipe the tails on with icing.  I think that it worked out just fine in the end!

So what goes with mice? Swiss cheese of course!  Call me crazy, but I think these little squares of cheese came out quite cute!

Can you tell what cutter I used for the mice heads?  Yep, a small heart.  That's a design by the brilliant Sugarbelle.

I had some major cratering on the mouse ears.  I tried to cover them with dots.  Thicker icing should help with that next time.

I haven't even mentioned the HUGE departure for me with this set.  I didn't use royal icing.  I used royal icing glaze!  An invention of the brilliant DippinPops AKA SweetP.  Here's her recipe.

It combines all of the benefits that royal icing and glaze have with none of the drawbacks.  I LOVED it.  This royal icing glaze (RIG) has the addition of corn syrup, glycerine, and cream of tartar.  It has a beautiful shine and elasticity to it.  It dries hard enough to stack but has a soft bite.  Not crunchy at all and delicious.  It stores amazingly well.  There was virtually no separation the next day.  Notice that it looks like royal icing.  It doesn't have the translucent look of glaze.

I'm going to keep playing with this, modifying the recipe a bit so that I get the consistency that works best for me.  I just may be a RIG convert.  Give it a try!