Falling Down the Hole: More Craters in Wonderland

 I've done a few sets of Alice in Wonderland cookies. I love the subject, as there's so much scope for a great variety of images. And Alice can be whoever you like unless you're being expected to use Disney, or Tenniel's illustrations, which are of course the most well known.

The first time I did Alice, I based her very much on the Winter Girls cookies by Klickitat Street, who are still among my favourite little characters. Go and take a look, and tell me they're not adorable! This is what I ended up making:

 

Somewhat later I was making another set of  Alice in Wonderland cookies and decided to create my own little Alice character, though still influenced by the Klickitat Street style:

 

I was quite pleased with her, but I don't think she's anywhere near as cute as the Klickitat style Alices, except perhaps for her toes!

So this time I wanted to do something completely different and had in mind to show Alice falling down the hole. I came across a wonderful Korean illustration, which took a little while to identify the artist. This is by Obsidian who has a blog, I think, but I couldn't get the page to translate. A lot of (her or his?) artwork is a entertaininly risqué but Alice is just beautiful:

And I decided she would fit perfectly on a round cookie. And that's when the cratering problems started up again.

You might have read my previous posts about how cratering is all cured by a dehydrator? I've positively boasted about it. Well things weren't as bad as my pre-dehydrator days but they were definitely troublesome. The Red Queen has been causing me mischief.

 

If you look closely at Alice's skirts and leg (below) you'll see the indentations forming in some of the small patches. Later that week I was piping a whole bunch of bows which all collapsed into horrid, ugly little holes, despite being put straight into the dehydrator, necessitating the addition of a little heart motif to cover them up (though it also looked quite pretty!).

  

Much discussion ensued in cookie circles about why this would be - one notable difference seemed to be the weather. It was pouring with torrential rain most of that week. There's general agreement that high humidity makes craters worse.

My take on it is that seeing as the idea to prevent craters is to very quickly crust over the top surface, strengthening it against collapse, when the weather's humid, that crusting process takes longer, even in a dehydrator. Long enough for parts of your cookie design to fall into a dreaded hole, rather like poor Alice.

My next plan is to get something like this, an embossing heat gun for those extra wet days. I've been warned that too much heat can cause the icing to expand and explode into cracks, so it'll be interesting: if I play my cards right maybe I can get the right balance between black holes and supernovae.

In the meantime, here's the rest of my most recent Alice set all tumbling down a giant Wonderland hole.

Where I extol the virtues of a dehydrator

I've had a chance lately to create a couple of sets of my own designs, both ordered by my mother for friends, and she is happy to leave the whole thing up to me. So nice to have a break from characters and logos!

For the first I bought an Orla Kiely gift box, and used the same colours to create a simple but striking set of flowers and leaves to fill the box with.

I loved the restricted colour palate and simple designs, just adding a bit of detail and movement with the lines and dots on the petals. There's something very satisfying about piping curvy, organic lines like this.

For the latest set, I turned to a greetings card I've had hanging around for a while, with abstract seedheads and plants on it, and used it as the inspiration for a very abstract set of cookies, for an anniversary gift.

I used a mixture of wet on wet flooding, piped details, and some lovely large blobs for flowerheads, that I would never have dared to try before The Beast came to live with us: my 6 tray dehydrator. It sits, ugly, dark and huge on my desk, but performs its duties marvelously. It dries the icing quickly enough to prevent cratering, an annoying habit of the icing to collapse in on itself on blobs and small areas of icing.

Cratering occurs because of the speed that moisture is wicked away from below the surface, in small areas (increased surface area to volume ratio the smaller something is - remember that from school? Or is it decreased - clearly I've forgotten). The surface is weakened before it has a chance to crust over and harden properly. The dehydrator causes a hard crust to form quickly enough to counteract the process.

You can see cratering in several spots in this old photo of a cookie (Alice, from an Alice in Wonderland set, who I based on the Winter Girls from Klickitat Street).

You can see where I've tried to patch up the sleeves, and added an extra 'blob' to one pigtail, and also where I've just left a crater in the hair tie on the left.

But no more. I can do blobs galore. And also add dark colours to light, as the surface dries fast enough in the dehydrator to prevent bleeding and blurring. It's also a good place to store the cookies in overnight as they're drying out, to keep them safe and stop all the tables in the house being covered with trays.

I found a nice set of natural coloured tart boxes that are perfect for boxing cookies to be hand delivered. So these are now waiting to be taken to their new home this weekend.