We ventured out last week to a cookie decorating class with instructor Jaclyn Douglas at the Bonnie Gordon School of Cake Design. To round out the group, one of our newly engaged readers, Carolyne and her friend Karen joined Catherine and me, at the school for two hours of education in royal icing. It was a sweet afternoon!
Even though none of us had much cookie decorating experience, we all left with three delightful seasonally inspired engagement cookies, a snow-couple’s engagement on a winter’s day, an announcement on a scroll and an engagement ring box, complete with sugar ‘diamond’ — each would work beautifully as a surprise engagement announcement, a save the date or a wedding announcement. We love the idea of leaving a pile of “we’re engaged” cookies out for family and friends to discover over the holidays (or anytime!)
From the right: our super talented instructor Jacklyn, Catherine, Carolyn, Karen and me.
Continue reading the post to get the DIY instruction and tools for your own cookie decorating.
Our tools included pre-baked sugar and gingerbread cookies which Jaclyn had already quickly filed with a zester to achieve straighter edges and a flat top, Royal Icing in both stiff and flood forms (flood just has a little extra water added to the mixture to make it runnier), and little balls of fondant -- we used fondant because we were short on time, but if you are making cookies at home, modelling chocolate tastes better. Also on the table were a rolling pin to flatten and smooth the fondant and two rulers each to put on either side of the fodent and to roll the pin over to achieve a uniform thickness, a small sharp knife for cutting the fondant and a small metal spatula for lifting our items and keeping them flat. Also available were edible sparkle dust and markers to put the final touches on the cookies.This is Karen's fondent rolled out and placed beneith her first sugar cookie, she's marking the four points where she wants to cut it to fit nicely on top, in a minute, she'll roll it into a scroll format and set it aside to dry
This is definitely Jaclyn's handiwork, her cookies were perfect to a T. Here she has outlined her sugar cookie in the stiff Royal icing - nice and steady lines are achieved by not touching the cookie much except to anchor the icing at the corners. She's used two different colours to outline the night sky and the snowy ground as well as her adorable couple. The top had is also made from stiff icing. She is now 'flooding' the back. She's keeping it nice and thick, avoiding the extreme edges which she will fix later by teasing the icing over with a toothpick and she's working fairly quickly. Ideally, she'd let her blue dry as much as possible before flooding with the white to avoid bleeding.
We added tiny drops of white flood to the still-very liquidy blue sky for snow and then used a toothpick to tease them into snowflakes
Carolyne very carefully adding her sugar crystal or "diamond ring" to the inside of the engagement ring box.
Adding the sugar crystal or 'diamond' to the ring.
Almost done! These are Catherine's cookies almost ready to go. At the bottom and the top she just needs to add her fondant banners (once she writes on them) and in the middle she's already finished her fondant, after allowing it to dry and glued it to the cookie by sticking it into the still-wet flood icing.
- Having never done anything like this before I can tell you that you can do this at home and it does get easier as you go. I think the most important things we learned were to set all our tools up from the beginning, to adapt our designs to our abilities (the snowmen we great because we felt like we created a lot but without the challenge of drawing a complex picture) and to let things dry. If you were to do this for a whole stack of cookies, laying them all out and doing one thing at a time is probably the best. This is definitely something you could re-create at home.
No comments yet.
