4th of July Cookie Cake

Hi, everyone. I'm Maddie Gartmann. I am a cookie decorator and the creator of Garty Goodies, and I am so happy you're here with me today 'cause I'm gonna show you how to make the cutest cookie cake for any gathering. We're gonna make a Fourth of July-themed one, but I know there's tons of barbecues and potlucks, and sometimes you just don't know what to bring, and you probably have a lot of these ingredients already in your cupboard at home. So I'm gonna show you the exact thing that you need to bring, and I promise it's super easy, anybody can do it. Now, the first step is totally optional because I'm gonna be making some royal icing cookies that we're going to use to decorate our cake. You don't need this at all, but it makes it a little extra cute. So we'll start out with six of these small, miniature cookies. I decided to do ice cream cones. You could also do stars for Fourth of July or whatever theme fits the barbecue that you're attending. For size reference, these are about two inches because our cookie cake is going to be 10 inches. And it'll feed probably about, hm, 10 to 15 people depending on how big of a slice you take. So these are just going to be the decorations for the top of our cookie cake, and we're gonna decorate these. Typically, we would do this probably the day before, if not two days before. But we'll decorate these now. And also, I should say, if you have any questions during this time, feel free to send them over and I'll try to be answering your questions throughout. And if not, I can answer questions at the end. So we're gonna be using royal icing to decorate these. These are just a basic sugar cookie, and this is my royal icing recipe, which is totally free, you can go to Creative Cake Design and see one of my free videos that walks you through step by step how to make this royal icing specifically. I've colored it in a white, red, blue, and this tan for the ice cream cone, and those are all just pretty standard colors, nothing special about the color mixing. And I'm gonna be working with one consistency of royal icing, which means the same consistency is going to be used to outline and flood our cookie. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with just the bottom cone part of our ice cream cone here. And outline, and then flood. This is a little bit of a thicker consistency, so it's gonna take some shaking of my cookie to really get it to spread out a little bit. But that's okay, 'cause that means it'll dry hopefully just a little bit faster, which is always nice. And we're just gonna go ahead and decorate each one of these with our bottom cone. Remember, the key is to lift your bag up slightly when you are decorating the outline part 'cause that helps create a straighter line. So you lift your bag up slightly. And if you're not familiar with royal icing, it is a type of icing that dries rather quickly, will crust over within a couple minutes, which makes it nice 'cause then you can stack these cookies, you can use them for different things, whereas a buttercream icing is always going to remain soft. But this will get a little bit harder on the outside, and that's what allows you to do so many of those intricate designs. So go through, and you can see the icing is starting to flatten out of our little ice cream cones. But I always like to give them a little shake too. I don't know what the technical term for this is, the little jiggle method, but that tends to flatten out my icing so I don't have those lumps in it. And we'll come back, let that dry a little bit, we'll come back and add our detail. I'm also gonna use my cookie scribe, which, in this case, is actually just a skewer. So a toothpick or a skewer works just fine to push that icing to where I want it to go. And then I'll take my other colors, we'll start with our white, and we're just going to decorate the tops of our ice cream cone. And again, lifting your bag slightly is really helpful. So we're just gonna decorate the tops, outline and flood. This white one is a little bit thinner of a consistency. This is typically what I work with when I decorate cookies. You don't want it any thinner than this. Otherwise, it'll end up falling off your cookie, so. We'll do one white one, and then we'll do two red and two blue ones in our patriotic theme here. So this is the relaxing part of cookie decorating. And you'll see why I'm only doing the very tops in a second, 'cause we're gonna do a different technique to get that true ice cream look. So we're just applying a little more pressure to our bag to squeeze out the icing a little bit faster when we are flooding it. And the nice thing is they're ice cream cones, so the texture doesn't have to be perfectly smooth. But while those are still pretty wet, we do wanna get some sprinkles on there. So for my red one here, you can see there's a lot of holes missing. And I don't wanna go with my fingers to shake it, so I'm just gonna grab my cookie scribe and use that to jiggle it. That's just a nice little trick so you don't have to worry about ruining any icing. And I'm gonna go ahead and take some patriotic sprinkles, which, if you go to a craft store right now, these are all over the stores. This is the time to buy patriotic sprinkles. That one's gonna be too big. And just get 'em in there while it is still nice and wet. We don't wanna wait any longer on that. And then, of course, I always, the perfectionist in me always has to push the sprinkles to exactly where I want them. Don't worry, I'm not using a tweezers this time. Usually, I use a tweezers. We won't get that perfect. Okay. And then we are going to do the blue one. Now, in the demonstration picture, I used a little bit of a darker blue, I'm using a lighter blue this time. I find that that darker blue tends to stain people's mouths, that navy blue. So this is a lighter, more sky blue. Both are perfectly fine, but I was just thinking we wouldn't have as many stained mouths if I didn't put quite as much dye in this one. Nothing wrong with a good blue tongue, though, I suppose. So we'll do our last one here. Oops. Let me get those shaken out a little bit. And then add our sprinkles while they are still wet. And like I said, you could do this with a more simple shape too, like a star, and I think it would be really cute, or you can just skip this step altogether and get right to the actual cake part 'cause this is just kind of a fun extra adornment. Now, our bottom cones have started to dry, so I'm gonna go back and add some details. The reason I didn't do that right away would be if I had tried to add the crisscross details that I'm gonna add here, it would've just sunk into the other icing and we would've lost any dimension. So I'm gonna go back and do some diagonal lines. I'll do three this way and probably one, two, maybe three that way. I think two works good. And go ahead and add those to the rest. So you can see, it has crusted over so that we can add that detail. That's the thing with decorating sugar cookies, is the way, the order that you do everything can make or break how the cookie looks. And now, it's okay that my lines are going over into this part because we're gonna cover that up with our ice cream. Do our last detail. I always like to rest my elbow on the counter and steady my hand with my other hand. That always helps me keep my bag a little bit steady, 'cause people always ask how do I get such straight lines? And that's part of it, is keeping your hand steady and then also lifting my bag up slightly. Okay. So, we're gonna go back, and now what we wanna do is we wanna make it look like that true ice cream scoop, which has kind of the fluffy part at the bottom. So we're gonna go back with our colors. Well, first with our white, and kind of make a little, we're just gonna work in a swirly motion. And we're gonna let this dry for just a minute, not for too long 'cause we're actually gonna go back in with our scribe and break up that icing after it has a crusted layer. And what that's gonna do is it's going to create that texture of the bottom of an ice cream scoop, the foot of the ice cream scoop, kind of like a macaron. I don't know what the technical term for that would be. And the thicker that your icing is like, you can see my blue icing is a little bit thicker, the easier this is to do to create that dimension. But if you look at my white, my white was thinner, so we're not gonna see quite as much of that dimension there. But this will crust over slightly after we let it dry, and then we can go in and break up the bottom part of our cookie. So it's already starting to crust. You can see I'm just going back with my skewer and just swirling it around. The more that it dries, the more we can achieve this look. So I might pop these under a fan. I'm gonna pop 'em under the fan for just, I don't know, maybe two minutes. And if you ever decorate royal icing cookies, I highly suggest investing in a small tabletop fan because there are so many different steps that you need to dry your cookies in between. So, like, for instance, this one is just a quick one-minute dry time with the fan blowing on it. Then I can come back, break up that icing, and then continue on with my next cookies. Usually, I would be working on a different set of cookies while I was waiting for this to dry, but it just really needs probably just a couple more seconds to let it dry. So we'll talk about the sugar cookie cake that we're going to be making. Now, this is, these cookies are like a harder sugar cookie. The sugar cookie cake that we're gonna make is a soft, chewy, delicious sugar cookie cake with buttercream frosting, which is delicious. I can never get enough buttercream frosting. So typically, we would make our cookies a couple days in advance. You could make them even a week in advance and throw 'em in the freezer, and then we would make our cake the day of the event or the day before. Let's see how our cookies are doing so we can finish up that technique. Like I said, they just needed a quick blow dry, essentially. So now let's go back and see. We can break up our icing. Yep, so it's dried just enough where we can kinda break it up and create sort of a fluffy ice cream texture effect, which I love. I love doing this to all of my ice cream cookies. And the blue one is even more dry because it was such a thicker icing to start out with. The white one might not be ready for this step, but that's okay. We can have a smoother bottom on the white one. So these are just some of the little details that make people just fall in love with royal icing cookies, I think, because they have so much character and detail to them, like these fluffy bottoms. I never wanna skip this step. So we would set these aside to dry. Probably the minimum amount of time that we'd want them to dry is about four to eight hours. That's why I say do it the day before. Don't try to do this step the same day that you're making the cookie cake if you're going to include this step. This is like that extra pizzazz, that extra thing to impress everybody at the barbecue or the potluck. We'll see if we can break up our white. Yep, this one is still a little bit wet, so we're gonna let this one dry. So I would make these a couple days in advance. Like I said, I might freeze them if it's gonna be several days in advance. And then the day before the event, I would make the cake. So let's put these to dry, and we're gonna start on the actual cake. Okay, so like I said, we're going to be making a 10-inch cookie cake, so you will need a 10-inch cake pan. This is mine, and I already have mine greased and ready to go. However you prefer to grease your pans. I use a mixture of vegetable oil, shortening, and flour, and mix that together, and I find it makes a great cake release. So you will need that 10-inch pan. You're going to set your oven for 375, pre-heat it for 375, and then we're going to make our dough. You can make the dough in advance, if you'd like, and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to bake. We're gonna do it all in one go here. So, for the ingredients for this sugar cookie cake, we're going to need a cup of sugar. You'll need 2 1/2 cups of flour, one egg, a teaspoon of vanilla, and then I prefer a teaspoon of almond extract as well. But if you don't like almond extract, you can always just double up on your vanilla. I use a teaspoon of salt. We can't forget a cup of butter, which is two sticks. I use unsalted butter so that I add the salt later. And then for this one, we're going to use some Fourth of July sprinkles. So, I got these red, white, and blue sprinkles just at the grocery store. These are like your jimmies sprinkles that bake up really nice 'cause it's essentially gonna look like a little Funfetti cake. So we're gonna start out in our mixer. Now, you do not need to have an electric mixer for this. I baked for many years without one. It is totally doable. But since I have one, I'm definitely gonna use it. Always nice to save all that arm strength. We're going to take our butter. Now, this is room temperature butter, and it is a little humid here in Minnesota right now, so it might be a little bit softer than room temperature. But you definitely wanna make sure your butter's at room temperature 'cause that's gonna allow it to cream even better with our sugar. So we're gonna take that and our cup of sugar in our mixer, and it would help to have the paddle in. And we're just gonna mix this until it starts to form a dough. Always helps to scrape down the sides. These paddles that have the scrapers on them are super helpful, especially in these bigger bowls, 'cause they tend to, ingredients tend to get globbed down at the bottom. Globbed is a technical term. We're gonna just get that going a little bit. Okay, so our butter and sugar has come together. We're going to add our egg. This is just one egg, beaten. Get all that egg into there. Like I said, this makes for just like a very simple, this is like your basic sugar cookie recipe, but it's always better to do homemade, right, than the store-bought dough. So we're gonna do our egg, we're going to do our vanilla. One teaspoon of vanilla and one teaspoon of that almond extract, and we're going to mix this together until it comes together. It will look kind of soupy. I'm gonna stop and scrape those sides again 'cause we don't want that butter getting left at the top. We wanna make sure everything's nicely incorporated. And we don't want anything stuck at the bottom too. So we're going to mix this for about 30 more seconds. Okay, and then we have our dry ingredients, which is the 2 1/2 cups of flour, I use just all-purpose unbleached flour, and then a teaspoon of salt. I'm going to combine those together before I put them in the mixer just so that the salt is nicely incorporated throughout all of the dough. Okay. And we're gonna go just slowly with this. Start out with a little so we don't have a big flour explosion everywhere. Okay, now, before our dough completely comes together, we're gonna add our sprinkles. And I found for the best impact, do this entire jar of sprinkles. It is 1.75 ounces, if that gives you an indication. And we're just gonna kind of sprinkle that in as it's mixing so that it gets thoroughly incorporated into all of our dough here. I'm gonna scrape the sides again. One thing I love about this dough is that you know it's finished when it starts to pull away cleanly from the sides. So you can see that the dough is completely starting to pull away from my bowl. I'm gonna give it one last scrape. And so you could even do more, I think you could even do more sprinkles, but maybe that's just me. Sort of like glitter, you can never have too much of it, right? So we'll just do one more. And we're good to go. Okay, so there's our dough. Now I did see, oh, crank. I'm used to my mixer facing the other direction when I bake at my house, it is. I did see a question from Becca that she heard adding a little bit of corn syrup helps give shine to your royal icing cookies. And corn syrup actually helps it get a softer bite. What's gonna help give it a shine is the type of meringue powder that you use in your cookies. I prefer a meringue powder brand called Genie's Dream. I find that that gives it the best shine. But corn syrup typically is added in order to give it that softer bite on the inside. So it'll be harder on top, but it won't chip your tooth when you bite into it. But as far as shine goes, the difference, what makes a bigger difference in shine is the brand of meringue powder. So I would definitely check out that Genie's Dream brand because it gives it a little bit more of a shine. The other thing that gives it a great shine is drying it in front of a fan, like I'm doing right now. That really makes a difference. If I let that air dry, it would be a completely matte cookie. But the fan definitely adds some shine. Oh, the side handle to raise and lower the bowl is super cool, Bailey said. Yeah, no, this is not on every mixer. This is on the larger mixers, which I just recently upgraded to a larger mixer myself. I think it starts at maybe the five-quart, maybe not. But the smaller mixers just have the regular attachment of getting the bowl. It took me so long to get used to that handle, and now I love it. But at first, it was an adjustment. So okay, we've got our dough here, and we've got our pan that has been pre-greased. Now, you could totally just go for it and start pressing the dough into the pan. But if you're a little bit more neurotic like me and you wanna make sure you get it evenly, I like to break it up into little balls, little chunks, sort of. So I'm gonna start with my center chunk. This isn't super scientific here. And put chunks around it. And the reason I like to do this is just because it makes sure that the dough is initially pretty evenly spaced, and then you can go back in and fill in any gaps. And this recipe works great for a 10-inch cake. Works absolutely perfectly. The trick is not eating the cookie dough before you put it in the pan, which can often be very tricky 'cause it's so delicious. Who doesn't love cookie dough? So just pressing it, trying to get as even as a layer as we can here. Up to the sides here. Bailey asked how did I know this was gonna be my career? Gosh, I didn't even know this was gonna be my career. This is something that completely took me by surprise. My original career was as a high school English teacher, which I knew was gonna be my career my whole life. And I started doing baking and cookie decorating for fun, and then left my job so I could stay at home with my son. But still needed to make some of the bill payments, and so I started selling what I was baking and then fell into this career. And little did I know this is what I was meant to be doing, at least for this time in my life. But I especially, still my favorite part of what I do is teaching other people to do it, like what I'm doing today, and that's just the teacher in me that will never die. Okay, so now I'm trying to just press this in. Now, you definitely wanna make sure that if you're using a cake pan that you did grease it beforehand 'cause we're gonna wanna be able to get this out without it coming apart. So that is definitely key. I'm gonna wipe my hands off here. Now, this will bake at 375 for about, I start checking on it at about 13 minutes, and I think in total I baked mine for about 17 minutes. I would just keep checking on it. What I look for is for the edges to be a completely golden brown 'cause then I know that it's done, and then I don't want the center to be a golden brown because I still want to have that delicious, gooey, not super gooey, not raw, but a nice, chewy texture for the center. So we would bake this for about, I'd say, 15 minutes, 17 minutes total. And I have a finished one. So we don't have to sit around waiting for something to bake. Now, the next step is also key. Hot out of the oven, which this one is not, but fresh out of the oven, this is what I think makes this cake so fun is that you don't need to have a projector to get a perfect star. But you do need to have a little star cookie cutter, which I think a lot of people have a star-shaped cookie cutter. While it is still hot, I pressed this cookie cutter into the cake, and then I use this smaller one too. So you could do this with any cookie cutter while it's still hot, just so I can get the indentation, and then I can trace it with my buttercream frosting. And I don't need to use a projector, I don't need to use a stencil or anything like that. So that is one key trick to this cookie cake, is doing it while it's still hot. If I did it while it was still in the dough form, chances are, while it bakes, that imprint would get totally lost. So we're going to take a, this is a 12-inch cake round. Obviously, you don't have to do this, you could just leave it in the pan. And I'm going to get my cookie cake out. And then we'll get it turned around one more time so that it's ready to go. So I've got my cookie cake, and I think I'll probably wanna add a little bit of buttercream to the bottom of that once we have that buttercream made. So usually, while it bakes, I would be making the buttercream. So let's move on to that step. Now, this, there is nothing special about this buttercream. It is your traditional American buttercream, which means it's full of a lot of sugar, and that's what makes it taste so delicious. So for our buttercream, I'm going to be using about four cups of powdered sugar, this was pre-measured, and then a cup of butter. If you have more than one cake, obviously, you're gonna wanna double this. But this, for me, I found that this makes the perfect amount for a cookie cake. I'm gonna do some vanilla and almond extract to match the flavor of our cake. And then I like to add some salt to cut the sweetness just a little bit. And again, we're gonna be working with unsalted room temperature butter. You also may want to add milk or cream to this depending on how your butter mixes up or how your frosting turns out. It might be a little bit too thick, and so you'll find you wanna add a little bit of milk. I don't think we'll be needing to add milk, just 'cause, like I said, it is pretty humid here. So, there are lots of different types of buttercreams that you can make that are more complicated, but I just like the basic, whoop! I'm gonna start with a little bit of powdered sugar just to start out with. And start it on low. No one said baking was clean. So this is gonna take a second to come together. It's gonna be a little bit crumbly at first. I'm gonna add a little bit of almond to this as well to bring this together. Just a drop. And then I'm gonna turn it all the way up. Oh, and I almost forgot my salt. Sprinkle just a tiny bit of salt, probably about a half a teaspoon. And we're gonna crank up the speed. Okay, looks like we got a little powdered sugar buildup, so I'm just gonna try to get that incorporated in. And I would typically mix for about five minutes on just a medium-high speed. You don't wanna mix for too long, too high of a speed, 'cause you're gonna find a lot of air bubbles in your buttercream when you go to pipe. So we kinda wanna bring it down to a little bit of a slower speed. So used to my crank being on the other side. So I'm gonna scrape the sides of my bowl quick. In this case, I'm not gonna color this, I'm just gonna keep it that natural off-white, just 'cause I kinda like that. I think it just makes it look more homemade than a perfectly white grocery store cake. But you can buy white food coloring and color it so it's got that crisp whiteness, which I love that look too. Both looks are cute. Or you can add, you know, red, make it any color that you want. My whole thing is I always worry about people's mouths turning a different color. So, if I'm at a barbecue, I don't want everyone's mouths to be blue because of the icing that I created. So I'm gonna just mix this one more time. It's actually got a great consistency, a great texture to it, so I don't wanna thin this out with milk. If I thin this out with milk, it would get a little too soupy, and I wouldn't be able to get some nice piping lines that I wanna get on my cake. Oh, so delicious. Okay. So that is pretty much ready to go. I might mix that a little bit longer if I were at home, just to make sure I get that smoothness that I'm looking for. But the main thing with the smoothness is that you wanna start with that butter at room temperature. If you get it any colder than that, you're gonna probably have butter chunks, and that's gonna be hard to work its way out. It's gonna take a little bit longer to mix. And if you microwave your butter, which I'll admit I've done many times when I've forgotten to set my butter out the day before, you do run the risk of it being extra soupy, and you're gonna be adding a lot more powdered sugar, which is, of course, gonna make it a lot sweeter. So I'm gonna grab one more spatula here. I always have a jar of, like, 10 spatulas at my house, and I think I go through all of them in one cake decorating session or one cookie session. Can never have too many spatulas. Okay, we wanna get all that delicious buttercream off of our paddle here. We don't wanna save any of that unless you wanna give it to someone to lick. This would be what my kids would be fighting over for sure. The buttercream paddle. Okay, so I wanna get all that deliciousness. I'm gonna give it one more kind of hand stir because I don't want to, I don't want that powdered sugar that I saw flaking off. I wanna make sure that that's fully incorporated here. Okay. See, one more little hand stir. Now, the reason I chose this as something I wanted to teach you guys today is because I really think anybody can make it. You just don't need to have that advanced of a skill level to do this. You know, if you are a beginner baker, this is something that you can do. It's as easy as mixing up dough. But I think the little touches of adding the piped stars that look so perfect, people are gonna think that you have that perfect handwriting when it comes to piping. I think that's what makes it so impressive. So you can fool people into thinking you are a master baker, even if you are just starting out. So there's our buttercream. Like I said, you can add more color to it if you'd like. Oh, good question. So the recipe, the downloadable recipe, it says it states seven cups of powdered sugar, and that is for a doubled batch, I believe. So this will just create one cookie cake. So that, I think, is one thing that needs to be corrected on that recipe. I'm glad you pointed that out, Lynn. Thank you. 'Cause that would be a lot of sugar. Nothing wrong with sugar, but that would be a lot. So I'm going to... Typically, when I make these, I make two at a time, so I think that's where my brain was when I was creating that. So I'm going to cut off the top of a piping bag. This is just a disposable piping bag. And I'm going to insert a small round tip. In this case, this is Wilton number four, and this is what I'm gonna use to create my stars. I'm going to pipe my stars on this. We just need a little bit of the buttercream for the stars. And I'm also going to, before I forget, add a little bit of buttercream so my cake isn't sliding around on that plate. So I'm gonna add just a little bit of buttercream to the bottom, just to act as just a little bit of glue for my cake there. Okay, so now I've got my tip. So you really just need a round tip. It doesn't matter what width. I have mine a fairly small width. And like I said, you don't need to have very many piping skills. If you can go back and forth, you can do this style. So I'm gonna start with the uppermost star so that my hand doesn't accidentally drag through icing if I started with the bottom. And I'm just gonna work my way back and forth, making sure to kinda touch down at the points of the star so that the icing rests really nicely. Again, super, super easy. You don't have to have ever piped anything in your life and you can probably do that. Now, if you want to, you could take a nice, warm spatula and you could smooth that out if you want a smooth top. But I'd say, why mess with something if it already looks cute? So now I'm gonna go on to the bigger star. And if you get little holes in your stripes like me, you can just go back and touch those up. I'm gonna slow down just a little so I can have a little bit straighter lines. And the little feet of the star. I mean, like I said, why mess with it if it already looks cute? I love that zigzag effect. And then our last one. And, of course, you could freehand that too, but when you have the cookie cutters, it creates that stencil for you, which I love. Now, while this icing is freshly piped, we're gonna add some more Fourth of July sprinkles. These are from the Sprinkle Pop shop. And I love the different sizes here. There. You can clean that up with a brush if you don't want 'em going everywhere. Push that one there. Okay, and now we're going to pipe our border. So it's really important that you do the inside before you pipe the border because you don't wanna be accidentally screwing up your design of your border when you go to pipe the inside. So I'm just getting my excess buttercream back into the bowl. And I'm going to use an open star tip. You could use, this is a Wilton 199, and this one doesn't have a number on it, but it's really comparable. But any of those open star tips, I think, work great. There's a lot of different styles of piping that we can do. I'm choosing to do this without a turntable because I want you to see how easy this is to do and that you don't need all the fancy equipment, like a turntable, in order to execute this. So I'm putting my piping tip in my bag. Bag goes in my cup so that I can get all that buttercream down to the bottom really easily. And yeah, we definitely only needed the four cups of powdered sugar, so I need to fix that on the recipe, because we will have probably the perfect amount of buttercream with just a little bit leftover, which is quality control, right? That's for licking off the spoon. So I'm gonna push this through. I may need to, halfway through, refill my bag. Oh, no! We got a little glop. Not to fear. We can fix it, guys. This is the story of baking, right? Little glop. I'm gonna try to put that in there. There. See, that's why it's so important to do the inside first, 'cause that could have been my border and then I wouldn't have been able to fix it quite as easy. So I just used my skewer to fix that. Okay, so, I'm going to do a rope border. Now, you do need a significant amount of icing. So if anybody, er, frosting for this, so if you are not a frosting lover, you probably won't wanna do this border because it really piles the frosting on. I, of course, am a frosting lover. So the technique that I'm going to be doing is just squeezing the icing out and then working in a circular motion and trying to keep the same width of my circles the entire way around my cake. So, yes, a turntable is great to have, but you don't need to have it. You can still accomplish this without it. So you can start from anywhere. I'm going to start from the outside and squeeze. Oops. Get a grip of my bag here. So it's essentially kinda like little rosettes. And what's nice is when I have to stop and adjust my bag, I can just pick back up and it will be covered up here from the icing. And any other mistakes get hidden with sprinkles. Like I said, sprinkles are sort of like glitter. Now, my buttercream is very thick, so it's a little bit harder to come out of the bag. If you end up adding a tablespoon or so of milk, that'll help it come out. But I'm going right up to the border here. Keep adjusting and turning. You could also just leave it in the pan too. You don't need to have a fancy cake plate. I know Dollar Tree makes some great tinfoil pie pans for bringing cakes to places, and they come with the lids on 'em, which is amazing. We're almost finished. I'm not even gonna have to refill my bag. One last swoop. Look how pretty that looks. Ah, frosting has gotta be one of the most satisfying things, as my buttercream is flying all over the place here. And then you just kinda connect it. I'm gonna push this little boo-boo from where I started when I was trying to get a grip. I'm gonna push that out of the way. And then anywhere else that I feel like there's a hole, just gonna cover that with sprinkles. So like I said, you can always have a designated sprinkles tweezer that's only for food. Okay. So now, this is totally fine. You could leave it at this. I mean, not even totally fine, this is beautiful and would impress anybody. But if you wanna bring it over to the top, we're gonna add those amazing sugar cookies that we decorated at the beginning of this. Oops. So we've got our cookies that have a nice crust over them. And because they were dried in front of the fan, they even got a little bit of a shine. Oh, I should have planned this out a little bit better. Maybe the red one. Red, white, blue. Well, we're gonna go for it. And just squish 'em in. Oh, gotta do that one the same. Look how cute. Adding those little extra sugar cookies can just bring it up to a whole other level when you are bringing this to a barbecue. I love it. So there you have it, you guys. This is, like I said, super easy. I made this all, if you don't count the cooking part of it, I made this all in about 45 minutes, so you can make this too. I'm gonna see if you guys have any questions, so feel free to send in any questions, and I can answer them for you. "Adding milk helps with the buttercream. I was just about to ask. I always seem to have troubles. It's hard and difficult to work with." Yes, milk definitely helps make your buttercream a little bit smoother. Cream, you know, any type of cream or milk will definitely help smooth it out. Definitely something you'll wanna add if you're having trouble like I was. Mine was a little bit thicker. You could also add water too, but it's gonna give it a little bit of a different texture to it. Jill, I'm so excited. I hope you try it. Jill says, "After watching, I feel like I might be able to do this." I think you can. I encourage you to try it, and I really think that people would find it impressive at your next barbecue. So, don't forget, you guys, the recipe is right there. You can click the link. It's right here on the live stream. You can see the, you can watch this live stream again for the step-by-step. But this is the perfect thing for you guys to bring to your next potluck or barbecue. Or you know what? Just to eat for yourself. So, I hope you guys enjoyed this. Thank you guys so much for sticking with me on this one.