For the Love of Cookies

This was the second Facebook-live cookie decorating session with the duo Marlyn-Hani (video available here). Last time, Marlyn was in charge of the party, when we made colorful hen cookies (see my post here). In this month’s session, Haniela had us decorate and assemble a super cute birdhouse. Here is mine…

I cannot tell you how much I love this cute house. Because it is small, you don’t need to use construction type gingerbread. A sturdy sugar cookie will do, make sure to bake it until the edges are getting dark, so that is holds better. I used my default recipe as published in my food blog here. These were flavored with honey and orange.

A few things had to be prepared in advance, like the adorable Royal icing transfers butterflies. Hani has a tutorial on youtube with all the details, you can see it here. Some of the steps are shown below.

Also, apart from baking the cookie components (using the templates provided by Hani), the house panels needed to be covered with a very light brushing of gray Royal icing and allowed to fully dry for 24 hours.

With all that ready, during the live event we moved on to decorating the front and back panels… and also the sides with Royal icing transfers for the windows (I did not take a picture of those). I loved the technique to give a wood-like texture. Finally, we piped stems, flowers, and leaves.

The house was then assembled with very thick Royal icing (that brought me horrific memories of my catastrophic performance in front of Paul Hollywood, Sherry Yard, and all my tent-baking friends), but thankfully those demons were exorcized and my bird house stood the challenge. Literally.

The roof is added last, and decorated with medium consistency icing, using two different icing tips, a petal 104 and a closed star. The final touch was adding the butterflies, as if they gently landed on the birdhouse…

All in all, a lovely little project! Of course, you can do many different color schemes to decorate, add different types of flowers, lady bugs, little birds, whatever you feel like it.

Funny tangent: Marlyn was decorating along… when we were perhaps 25 minutes into the live, her house was done. Ready. With all bells and whistles. She used a different style for the panels, to give the house a more woodland appearance, in tones of brown. And different types of flowers. It was gorgeous, and you can see it in the video, available HERE.

Huge thank you to Hani and Marlyn for organizing these events!