Just before Christmas it's the Honeykitten's birthday. Because of this, she often doesn't get the best of cookie sets, as I'm all cookied out from the seasonal orders. It's very unfair. This year I decided to remedy that. As cats are naturally her faourite animals, I made her these three, using gold and silver to add a little winter sparkle.
I recently had the opportunity to create a set of peacock feather cookies for my step-daughter's wedding. I've wanted to try my hand at these for ages, and thought it would be a doddle. Lovely colours, lots of lustre dust.
I recently had a request to create a small set of Gruffalo cookies. It seemed fairly obvious that I should handpaint the designs after the illustrations for the book, but I wanted to make them a little different, or original somehow.
I absolutely love glitter on cookies. When I first started out, disco dust (and glitters like it, such as this) was still being sold as 'edible' and I happily used it (and ate it) in large quantities. Then The Authorities (in the UK) realised that it was, strictly speaking, not an edible product, as it is not digested and has no nutritional value, and therefore couldn't be sold as such.
I've been fiddling about with edible silver this Christmas. It's bloody tricky stuff! I'm very much an amateur, put off practicing by the price of the silver. But it's so beautiful, it gleams like no lustre dust or paint, and creates a lovely surface to pipe onto.
This is just a quick post. I created this delicate horse's head design for these cookie favours, which you can print or download, and adjust for use on your own cookies (or whatever else you might want a horse's head for!).
I piped my designs in beige on a 'mother of pearl' royal icing background, then painted the beige with gold lustre. The 'mother of pearl' effect was really easy. The cookies were flooded with ivory royal icing, then when perfectly dry, I gently dusted them in patches, with shades of pink, blue, purple and green lustre dusts. With clean dry fingers, I 'polished' each cookie gently, so the surface no longer rubs off dust, and is a perfect surface to transcribe a design onto.
And the video? Well I've been asked so often about the bag clips I use on my icing bags that I thought I'd film another use I have for them. They're OXO Good Grips bag cinches - you can find them here on Amazon, but I've bought them in kitchen equipment shops too. Each one is springloaded, so you just squeeze in the ends, and the centre opens, to pop around your icing (or cookie) bag. As you use up the icing, squeeze a little to allow the clip to move down the bag, and let go. Simple as that. I can't believe how much time I used to spend wrapping elastic bands around and around and around...
But here I am, using them to make tying ribbon easy:
And that's all for this post, really simple. But I've got something timey-wimey in the works I can't wait to show you...
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.
There are many beautiful hydrangea cookies and cupcakes around, but I haven't seen any lacecap versions. I particularly like this kind of hydrangea with its tight little buds in the centre, varying from green to blue (or pink, depending on whether you live in Cornwall or Birmingham. I live in Birmingham. My hydrangeas are mostly pink. I like blue hydrangeas. So I made these cookies blue. It makes me feel like I'm back in Cornwall again).
(See? Pink!)
I frankencookied the basic shape as Glorious Treats did in this great tutorial and I was considering using brush embroidery in the same way, as the effect of the colour over the background is beautiful, but I wanted to have a go at piping actual petals.
I've never actually done this before, apart from one practice at RI roses being taught by the very talented, very patient Karen of Sucre Coeur. But I was slightly hungover at the time after a weekend of cookie debauchery and I'm ashamed to say I never practiced again. And of course you can tell. Just look at the way I pipe in the video - it's a disgrace, and that's after the worst bits have been edited out!
But I think this particular cookie is very forgiving. The overall effect works, even if individual petals are curling up in embarrassment. So here it is, in all its flawed glory:
You will need:
Hydrangea cookies
Green flood royal icing
Purple and blue lustre dusts (I used Rainbow Dust Starlight Purple Planet and Pearl Pacific Blue)
Large and small, dry, food-use only brushes
Stiff pale blue royal icing with petal tip (eg Wilton 104)
Small white sugar pearls
Dark blue and light green thick flood royal icing
Pink lustre dust (I used Sugarflair Shimmer Pink)
1. Flood the flower area in the darker green flood and allow to dry really thoroughly overnight (otherwise the lustre dust will stick and smear).
2. Using the purple and blue lustre dusts, dust the outer area of the green icing in patches.
3. Pipe blue four-petalled flowers around the outer edge, popping a sugar pearl into the centre of each one.
4. Pipe dark blue dots in groups of different sizes in the open centre and between the flowers, with a few smaller ones around the outer edge. Add a few green dots here and there.
5. Flood the leaves with green, and immediately pipe fine light green veins (I used a PME tip 1.5 for the veins).
6. Once the blue petals have dried thoroughly, with a smaller brush, dust the outer edges pink, and the centres purple.
I made this set as an engagement gift, and added a few simple leaves, popping them in a window 'tart' box, wrapped some green garden twine around a few times, and added a tag which was the perfect excuse to use my new Honeycat Cookies stamp. Fairly simple to make, fairly forgiving of poor piping skills, these make a lovely gift. Now I'm thinking I'd like to try some pink ones, after all...
Finally I have had an order for ammonites! I've wanted to do something like this for ages. But I need someone else to tell me to do it otherwise I'm too lazy and the ideas stay in my head. The client wanted cookies based on a fossil ammonite 'pavement', rather like this one in Lyme Regis. When you need a cookie pavement, what better than the trusty hexagon cutter?
I discovered something making these cookies...craters are not my enemy! At least not on this style of design. You can see it clearly in the video (below), most of the chambers of the ammonite have cratered, but the resulting texture is perfect for the fossilised effect. I had a suspicion it might happen, and wasn't too fussed about taking steps to prevent it, as I wondered what it would look like. In fact, I had considered deliberately inflicting cracks on the semi-dry surface, but there was no need. Anyway, have a look at the video and see what you think!
I find small areas crater less on the bare biscuit surface (presumably because it's moister than the dry icing of a flooded base and slower to wick water away from the small area on top. In this case though, the dry outlines and the very small areas just weren't going to be a crater free combination whatever I did. If it really mattered, I'd probably have tried the pattern a different way. Maybe flooding the ammonite shape and piping the chambers on top of the wet flood in stiff royal icing in an 'embossing' effect as I did here in my debut 'What's New, Honeycat?' post. Or just filling in the chambers while the outlines were still wet.
You'll notice at the beginning of the video too that I am using a projected image of an ammonite to trace around the spiral - I did try freehanding it at first, I didn't want to show anyone the result... I've finally switched from using the Camera Lucida ipad app, as great as it is for the price, to a Pico Projector. My eyes are getting old and grizzled, and I was finding it harder to see both the ipad screen (close up) and the cookie (far away). I just couldn't decide whether to keep my glasses on or off. I still use the app to manipulate the image as needed, but the projector is such a tiny little thing, and so incredibly useful it was really worth the investment. You can see the whole set up and how it works here on Anita's great video.
Whilst most cookies in this set were decorated as seen in the video, there were a few I did differently. After piping the main outlines and allowing to dry, I simply painted over the top with liquid royal icing, embedding a few sugar pearls here and there, smoothing the tops off with my finger, and allowing to dry, before finally painting with food colouring and lustre dust.
I'm very excited today as this is going to be my first (UK only) GIVEAWAY here on my blog! And yes, I did shout that. I created one more set of my Rustic Robin cookies, in order to film how I painted the little robins, and write a new tutorial for my 'What's New, Honeycat?' feature over on Cookie Connection. (To see the whole collection, just click on the badge in the sidebar).
Which leaves me with a set of new cookies which I could eat I suppose. But that would be so sad, just sitting here, alone, looking at the rain, eating robins...
...and it struck me that I've been muttering occasionally about a giveaway from time to time over on my Facebook page, as all you lovely people who have been joining in and following me over there (you do follow me over there don't you?) might have noticed, and wondered 'whatever happened to that idea?' but politely kept quiet about it.
Well it's about time I kept my promises isn't it? So that one of you can sit, alone, looking at the rain, munching on robins...
So here it is! One box, with two layers of cookies (approximately 20 of varying sizes from 1" to 4"). There is one handpainted robin in the set, plus lots of snowflakes, frosty toadstools and berries, and sparkly leaves, in vanilla bean biscuit with royal icing. (Ingredients listed at the base of this post.)
Oh, and that isn't all, there's that VIDEO I mentioned! Well, have a look at how I painted that sweet little robin, then imagine yourself biting his sugary little head off. It could be you! For much more detail on the process of handpainting cookies, make sure you head to Cookie Connection and read the TUTORIAL! Ok, that's enough shouting, here's the video.
I'm afraid this giveaway will have to be limited to the UK only due to my insurance restrictions. Also, these cookies are fresh now, carefully wrapped and so will remain good to eat for quite a few weeks more, but I wouldn't want to risk them sitting for six months in the global postal system! But don't worry, I'm putting together a little collection of some of my favourite things, and will have an international giveaway in a while.
Just fill in the Rafflecopter entry form below and I will contact the winner
for their UK address, and pop the cookies in the post to you! Giveaway ends Monday 19th January 2015 12am (ie Sunday midnight). Please remember UK ENTRIES ONLY - I can't send cookies outside the UK (subscribe to my blog so as not to miss my international giveaway coming up soon). As well as using the widget, if your comment doesn't show up, please comment directly on this blog post - tell me what you'd like to see Honeycat Cookies make! I shall make sure the draw is taken fairly by cross-checking all the entrants. Thank you.
Terms and Conditions: UK only. The winner will be chosen at random. I will send one box of cookies in the design shown in these photographs to the winner of the giveaway, entirely free including free P&P, within 3 business days of being provided with a UK postal address by the winner. I will announce and email the winner on Monday 19th January 2015. If I have not had a response with a UK postal address from the winner within 3 days of emailing I will pick a new winner. No cash or product alternative. I cannot be held responsible for loss or damage in the post. The ingredients are as listed below, please check carefully if you have any concerns about allergy or food intolerances.
Ingredients: Wheat flour, Sugar, Butter, Cornflour, Royal Icing (Powdered sugar, Dried Egg White, Anti-caking Agent Tricalcium Phosphate E341), Egg, Lemon Juice, Vanilla Bean, Salt. Food Colourings, Lustre Dusts and Flavourings; any or all of the following: E422, E1520, E551, colours E153, E133, E122, E104, E129, E124, E153, E155, E102, E110. (E122, E129, E102 and E124 may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children). Allergy Advice: Contains whole egg and wheat. May contain traces of nut: all products are homemade in my kitchen, where I both store and cook with a variety of nuts.
I made these little mini ladybird cookies for the Queen of Ladybirds's birthday and I thought you might like to know how they're made as it's really quite simple!
What you will need:
Egg shaped cookies
Edible pen or scribe for transferring the pattern
Red and black, and just a little cream 20 second royal icing
Black piping icing
Black metallic edible paint (optional)
Lets start with the simpler version: 'Bird's Eye View'
1. Draw the outlines of the head, nose and wingcase of the ladybird onto the egg shaped cookie with an edible marker. You can either copy freehand, or copy/paste and print out the above photo to use as a template.
2. Taking the cream 20 second royal icing with a tip 2, pipe a couple of blobs either side of the nose and a couple more above. Make them irregular in shape, but symmetrical - the key to the bird's eye view is symmetry!
3. Immediately pipe around the cream in black 20 second icing and let the surface crust.
4. Fill the nose area in black and add two cream blobs, like 'eyes'.
5. Pipe one wingcase in either black or red and...
6. immediately pipe a few irregularly shaped blobs in the alternative colour. Let this crust over.
7. Repeat with the second wingcase, adding blobs to be symmetrical to the other side.
8. Once the surface is dry enough to take stiff piping on top, pipe a couple of antennae curving back from the side of the 'nose' and ending in small blobs on the wingcases.
Now for the 'Ant's Eye View'... The stages are identical as above, except I allowed the red to dry thoroughly, then painted the spots on with black. You could instead just pipe wet on wet black spots. In this case I tried to maintain both symmetry and perspective, to give the impression of the spots disappearing over the ladybird's back. I also added three little jointed legs emerging from beneath the wingcase.
Try and make sure you keep the red nice and puffy (keep it thick and use a fan or dehydrator).
Here she is on her nest of leaves. Try flipping the outlines to create ladybirds heading off to the right too. That way they can pair up and dance.
The Ladybird Queen (seen here on her pumpkin throne) was created in the same way, just on a larger egg shaped cookie and with the addition of pupils to create eyes, pouty lips, and of course a gold crown.
And from the ridiculously large to the ridiculously small, a quick video showing how to make life sized RI transfer ladybirds...
That's it for Autumn this year, just a big bunch of beetles. If you fancy trying other insects, there's some pretty frosty spiders on my tutorial feature at Cookie Connection here.
My oven is sparkly clean, I have more dough to make (and the recipe to tweak which is always fun), but I took time out to add the finishing touches to my latest creation... finally... I bring you The Head of Elsa! Just call me Frankencat.
