BAKING PROJECT

I’ve seen some great design on cakes using the brush embroidery technique.  The same technique can be applied on cookies too, the ones using royal icing.  With a spare fondant covered cake (extras from the classes I taught)  I managed to play around using this technique and created this tutorial.

Equipments needed are :   Round tips/ nozzle (No. 1 or 2). Alternatively, you could just snip off the ends of a disposable piping bag.  Others : Piping bags, small flat end paint brush, water, tissues and some gel colourings.   Also ingredients to make the royal icing, make sure it is not of a soft consistency.  To transfer the design, you could use a few methods.  The easiest is to emboss the shape onto the fondant using any cutters.  This can only be done if the fondant is still relatively soft.  Otherwise, you can prick the design or draw freehand.  I’m drawing mine with an edible ink marker.

Now we are ready to start the piping and brushing.  The thing to remember is to start on the background first.  So in my case I will start on the leaves at the back.

Pipe the royal icing around the leaf, following its shape. If you wish, you can pipe a second line within (meaning to outline it twice.  But somehow I find it to be too thick).

With a damp brush, working from the outside towards the center of the leaf, brush the icing using a long stroke.  Leave more icing at the edges of the leaves and it should just fade away towards the inside.  The veins of the leave can be piped last with a smaller tube.  Let the whole thing dry up.  Be sure to clean the paint brush with water, from time to time.  You could also remove the icing with the paint brush if you think it is too much.

For the flowers,  brush the back petals first before starting on the front petals (if your design has separate distinct petals).  Here’s my completed leaves and flowers ( not so pretty artwork !)

After the icing has completely dry, you can add shading or tones by using gel/ concentrated paste colours which have been diluted with water or alcohol.  Just paint or touch up with the diluted colours like you would, using a water colour, but remember to use as little water as possible.  So I’ve darkened some parts of the leaves and flowers to illustrate the difference in lighting.   (hope your design will come out better than mine !)

Its a fairly simple technique actually, and if you are good in Seni Lukis, then this will just be a breeze.   Any experts who does brush embroidery, kindly leave your comment on how to improve on this technique.. I know mine needs a lot of working.  Thanks .

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At last,  we managed to decorate the cookies made weeks before.. well kept in an airtight container.   It was a fun session, the cookies were mostly decorated by my daughter.  Just testing the theories and careless decorating (on my part).

I must say kudos to the authors of the book “Cookie Craft” below.  I love the book and it has all the information you need to get started.  I bought the book online but have seen it in Kinokuniya in KLCC. As you can see we really did go to town on the cookie decorating. Everyone loves a cookie, they are great to eat when you have a cup of tea, during a game of bingo and as a little treat before bed. With this book you can make them look really special as well as them tasting so good.

Also, check-out the website  Karen’s Cookies for excellent tutorials on cookie decorating. I’ve also bought some tools here and their service is good.

Basically, you need Royal icing (RI) to decorate the sugar cookies.  Here’s the recipe that I used, from the book above.

It is quite difficult to say exactly how many tablespoon of water you need coz the consistency depends on the weather or our kitchen temperature.  To make the outline, the RI have to be a bit thick, this acts like a dam to hold the flood icing.  For the flood icing (or flow icing) the consistency is similar to a heavy cream.  It shouldn’t be too thin like water or too thick that it won’t flow to fill up the cookies.   To make the flood icing, just add double the amount of water and test as you go.

For our little project, I did the outline with a round tip/ nozzle.

The best size to use  is round tip #2 or 3. For the blue one, I think the nozzle was bigger and the outline look too fat   . Start by outlining all the cookies, then go on to flood them. For the flood icing, it’s best to just use squeeze bottles.  Squeeze in the middle of the cookies and use a toothpick to guide the icing into narrow corners.

The colour of the outline and the flood icing should also be the same, you probably need to add a tiny bit of colouring to the flood icing.   Obviously I skip this step as you can see above. Anyway,  when the RI is still wet, you can make some designs. This is called Flooding on wet flood.  Squeeze a different colour of Flood icing – dots , lines, squiggles, etc then run a toothpick over the pattern.

Making feathered hearts :-

Have a look at this website where they used the marbling and feathering technique on coffee.. very interesting !

While the RI is still wet,you could also add sprinkles and such, then leave the cookie to dry for about 2 to 3 hours.  And its ready to eat

I guess cookie decorating does require some amount of patience.  After the flood icing is totally dry, you could go on to pipe more patterns using the Outline icing.  For the pattern below, I did another outline and then press the cookie on to some sugar sprinkles (or use sanding sugar).  Use a small brush to dust of the extra sugar.

Apart from Royal icing, you can also decorate the cookies with fondant.. which is much easier and less messy .. just cut out the fondant with the same cookie cutter and glue it to the cookie.

Overall, I do like to use Royal icing to decorate cookies, but this is not something you do in a hurry..    If you want to learn more,  please check out my Fancy cookie class, detail at the top page above.

Till then, take care and we’ll keep in touch in my Facebook.  Thanks.