Penguins of Madagascar Cookies

Here are some cookies from our Penguins of Madagascar themed party. ('Cause I'm already totally over these critters and ready to move on...!) 

I made royal icing transfers for the penguins, because that seemed easier than sketching each character onto the cookies. And it was a very easy process. So easy that I managed to do them during the school holidays with yells for Mom interrupting me every 5 seconds.

To make transfers, print out appropriately sized images. Tape them to your work surface and tape a sheet of clear acetate on top. You'll be piping your royal icing onto the acetate.

 These are shadowy, bad-angled photos, but basically I outlined and filled in the black areas first.

Allowed those to dry, then outlined the white areas and filled those in.

When the white areas were set, I filled in the orange beaks and added the feet.

Last were the eyes - blue dots with black pupils.

The penguins were left to dry for 24 hours before I lifted them with a palette knife and transferred to freshly flooded cookies.
A few of the feet broke off in the process, but they were easy enough to pipe onto the dried cookie.

Enough of the Penguins now. If you want to see the cake pops, they're on the Tea, Cake and Create Facebook page. 

;o) 

xxM 

Love Bee Cookies

So a few days ago I posted the question "how many heart shapes could one possibly transform into bees?" It was rhetorical... I knew the answer - every heart!
Bees buzzing everywhere!
It happens like that if you're a little OTT about themes the way I am....

Let's talk about the evolution of these canoodling bees from a double heart cutter ...

ca·noo·dle

kəˈno͞odl/

verb

informal

gerund or present participle: canoodling

1. kiss and cuddle amorously.

   "she was caught canoodling with her boyfriend"

   
   

   
   

Sketch on paper:

 Sketch on cookie:

Outline wings with piping consistency icing* and an Ateco 00 or PME 1.5 tip.

 Outline bodies

 and stripes
(Yes, I know - different bees!
Just be grateful there are photo's, ok?!)

Flood a section with flooding consistency icing* ("15 second icing" )

 After the first stripe has dried (approx. 20 min)
fill in the yellow, and the opposite side's black stripe. Add some wet-on-wet pink cheeks
(you'll see them in the next pic!)

Fill in the outer wing first, let that set before  flooding the second wing

Use piping consistency icing to add final details - eyes, feelers, little shared heart.
















For a royal icing recipe and explanation of consistencies, see here.

Cookie designs inspired by Sweet SugarBelle, SweetFace Cookie Boutique and Cookie Crazie;
the canoodlers are my own ;o) 

Ha-bee decorating!

xxM

Cosmetics Cookies

I'm trying to be on top of things - I really am. Working on projects a couple of weeks in advance (how organised is that?!) because things are going to get a little crazy around here after next week.
Why?
Surviving school holidays; hosting Dot Klerck's classes, running a class of my own, and making a baby shower cake for a friend. Listed like that it doesn't sound so bad. Or does it? Maybe I'm not thinking straight...delirious from anticipation/apprehension!

But, for now: simpler things. Tomorrow is the second and final Corsets and Cosmetics Cookies class...

...and in case you missed them "live", here's a quick note on adding dimension to your cookie >

If you want adjacent areas on your cookie to be visually distinct, then you need to flood them at different times. It's pretty obvious when you're working with different colours, or areas that have to look different; but it is also a very effective technique when only using one colour in one area of a cookie. 

Here's an example:

These areas were outlined with piping consistency royal icing using a small plain tip (Ateco 00 or PME 1.5), then flooded with 15second icing using an Ateco 1 tip.

(For an explanation of royal icing consistencies see here and here.)

Then those segments are left to dry for about 20minutes (depending on the ambient humidity) before flooding the remaining segments.


                                        
And there you can see the clear distinction between the areas that dried separately.

After that whole area dried, then the top of the perfume bottle was piped on, and the royal icing rose added.

Happy decorating!

xxM 

Valentines Cookies: Wet-on-Wet Hearts

This might be a few hours (days?!) too late to be of any use for V Day. I'm sorry about that, but it seems I'm still on island time. It was a great break, wonderfully relaxing; and so it's quite a shock to the system to be back to reality. What - I have to cook? And clean? And no-one's serving me vanilla tea for breakfast?? Not even today, on Valentine's Day??

Quite clearly, I'm suffering from island fever in reverse, and the only cure is another holiday… ha ha... sob…

Poolside iPhone snapshot

So, I'm going to keep this really short and simple, if that's okay with you?

Wet-on-Wet Hearts

Outline and flood a biscuit with flooding consistency royal icing (15second icing):

Outline

Flood

(Red icing coloured with a mix of Red Red and Super Red gel colours.)

Immediately pipe dots of a different colour icing onto the flooded background - use flooding consistency for the dots, too.

Wet-on-wet dots

Drag the tip of a toothpick through the dots - start above the dot and pull through the icing until you have created the heart shape. In this case the direction of pull was from the notch of the heart, anti-clockwise and downwards:

Wet-on-wet hearts

Repeat on the other side:

Allow to dry for 24 hrs before packaging.

I hope you are having a lovely and love-filled Valentine's Day!

xxM