Conversation with a Bee. A Midsummer Night's Dream Gingerbread Stage Set and Video

You know that scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream where Titania gets bored of the donkey and goes off to gossip with a bee? No? Understandable. It's a little known deleted scene from the play*, but having a bee in my bonnet about such things, when I was invited by Bella Baking to participate in a Midsummer Night's Dream sugarcraft collaboration, I jumped at the opportunity. Originally the idea was to reveal our work on Midsummer's Eve, but the project was picked up by Cake Masters magazine for publication in September or October (which is how I got caught out and hadn't written this post, or edited the video when the feature was published!), so we've held on to our work for quite some time!

*This is of course a load of rubbish

My first thought was to turn to Arthur Rackham's illustrations for the play. I knew I wanted to create something gnarly and natural, but what really caught my eye was this gorgeous little bumble bee painting. I knew he had to feature, and somehow he became the centrepiece, with everything else, including Titania, merely suggestive of the play.

So I knew I wanted to create lots of naturalistic handpainted elements, with a gnarled background, but that wasn't enough. I wanted to be able to convey the warm twilight of Midsummer's night, using a tiny metallic thread of LED lights I have. I had my backdrop, my lighting, I simply needed to add the rest of the stage set...

I began with a six inch square of gingerbread, microplaned after baking for perfectly straight edges. The side pieces I created by eye, out of a second six inch slab of gingerbread, using a scalpel, and a straw to create the gaps.

I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to hold up my side pieces, whilst keeping the sides free for the lighting, but in the end, I made dozens of tiny 'buttons' of gingerbread, figuring I'd stack them up with royal icing glue to make colums. I knew there was going to be fiddling and adjusting - this was not a technically accurate piece of work!

The royal icing elements I piped, again by eye, in white icing, directly onto a sheet of acetate. I piped lots of little heads, and whole bodies, so that I could choose the best. I had pictures of mushrooms and bees (inluding Rackham's illustration, above) to reference.

I handpainted all the transfer pieces once fully dry (after a couple of days) and whilst still attached to the acetate, and allowed the paint to fully dry before attempting to detach them (a tricky business as the acetate was quite stiff - I have since used much thinner cellophane, taped to card, to do this, and once the tape is cut, the flexibility of the thin cellophane makes removing the pieces much easier). I used the same handpainting technique as I demonstrate here in my Christmas Robin video.

Several heads were painted and attached to the stage side pieces, whilst I chose the smallest most delicate fairy for Titania. I barely painted her as I felt she might end up a little clumsy. Her wings I flipped over when they were dry, and used the smooth base as the upper side, and I added just a few sprays of dots above her head to imply some form of headress, seeing as she's meant to be a Queen.

I coated all the base and side pieces in stiff white icing with an offset palette knife - this was trickier than it sounds, due to all the fiddly shapes, and getting the icing to be rough in just the right places and directions. This is sprinkled strategically with white and gold tiny sugar pearls. I scraped a hole for the moon, which I then filled with flood icing. The side pieces had further wriggly piping on top, to suggest branches, roots and leaves in the Rackham fashion, and the whole was painted with washes of green and blue, with some dark bronze lustre to highlight some branches.

Construction occurred just as I predicted, with a fair amount of fiddling and adjustment. I experimented with different heights and arrangements (in the process breaking a mushroom, Titania's neck, and an entire side piece snapped in two. Still, with clean breaks, you can hide most damage!). I had quite a few little ladybirds, and mushrooms left over. I ate those.

So here's the film, vastly speeded up and edited, as altogether it was nearly an hour of film (and I didn't film the entire project. I do want to film handpainting of some of these naturalistic royal icing elements, so I've got some on the go at the moment - don't forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel so you don't miss anything!)

To take the final photographs, I wound copper wire with tiny embedded LEDs  in and around the sides; another painstaking and delicate operation for fear of pulling the heads off fairies. The whole thing was tucked into black velvet so the lights glowed prettily.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Cookie Set

Commissioned to make a set of A Midsummer Night's Dream cookies, as a thank you gift for a teacher, I wanted to do something different, in style, technique and design. I've been wanting to try a freer method of cookie decorating and haven't been able to get this beautiful set of ballerina cookies The Cookie Architect made for her Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #2 out of my mind.

What inspired the 'jigsaw' shapes was the ever present difficulty I have of creating a set that fits the tins I keep for these sorts of gifts. I usually start by making an estimate of the balance of sizes and complexity needed, then make extra to ensure that the finished tin doesn't end up with a layer of just one cookie. That's not a good look when you lift the last layer and find just one cookie at the bottom.

This method usually works well for my household though, as there are always extras lying around for lunch boxes. But it takes ages to pack a tin, going in and out and rearranging layers so the cookies don't slide about too much, yet each layer having a nice balance of designs.

Anyway, this time I was lying in bed meant to be sleeping but thinking instead about cookies; not just cookies, but fitting odd shaped cookies together into rectangles, because that's normal; and it occurred to me how easy it would be if I could just make big tin-sized rectangles.

 So that's what I did. I created three big tin-sized rectangles. But then so that it didn't seem like I was getting away with just making three cookies for an order, I chose a couple of ordinary cutters, cut them out of the rectangles, then used a scalpel to hand cut the rest of the shapes around them. There was a certain amount of guesswork regarding size and allowing for spread of individual pieces, but it all seemed to work out quite well.

The backgrounds I spread with stiff white royal icing and a palette knife, leaving rough(ish) edges and swirls that fit the shapes, but which would enhance rather than interfere with the designs I wanted to create, like the tree and its roots below. I pressed a few sugar pearls into some areas, and when dry I had fun with lustre and petal dusts, and a little edible paint, to create three colours schemes for the three rectangles.

As for the images, first and foremost I had Arthur Rackham's illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream in mind, but I collected a number of different illustrations in the same vein in a Pinterest board here.

For most of the cookies, I simply used my tipless bag of soft white RI and 'drew' freehand, in stages, particularly for the couple of images of Titania (see above and below). Lots of flowing hair, a suggestion of wing and crown, and a little lustre dust to highlight is all the Queen of fairies needs really.

For the detailed head of Bottom (below) I made a few marks with edible pen to start with, just to get the overall dimensions, then referred to Rackham's illustration for more detail.

Puck clinging to the tree however was  a direct copy of 'Puck' by Charles Vess and I used the Camera Lucida ipad app to scratch the image on the cookie with a scribe. I hadn't intended to paint the faces on these cookies, but keep them in a cameo style, but I couldn't help add a hint of 'puckishness' to this one.