SUMMER INSPIRATION

Haniela came up with a super cool idea for her Patreon members: she set up a Pinterest board to inspire us to make cookies with a summer aura. The board is huge, colorful, and not centered on cookies, actually. Instead, you will find drawings, wood decorations, bowls, and from those items you can get inspired. I absolutely LOVED doing this! I chose three different designs and will show you how each one was made in cookie shape. To join Haniela’s site, click here.

DESIGN #1
STRIPED STARS

I must admit this design was my favorite of the three because I had to come up with several different techniques to get the look I was hoping for. Aged wood. Tied rope. They turned out better than I expected, which is not that common for me. You know I can be petty hard on myself… To see the starting point from the Pinterest board, click here.

First cut the cookies and before they bake, use a bench scraper to mark the wooden boards. I also made some in which I scraped the sections with an icing needle after baking, but you get quite a few crumbs that are hard to brush off and might interfere with icing later. I prefer the bench scraper method at the raw cookie stage. Next, brush the different sections with very thin Royal icing so that you will have an almost transparent layer. The cookies will have barely any icing on them, which will please some people. Once that sets, use super diluted luster powder and a brush with special shaped bristles to give the wooden look. Finally, pipe the rope and once that sets use a very fine food safe pen to add the details, and glue the fondant decoration on top.

DESIGN #2
THE SURF BOARD

To see the inspiration for these, click here. First I started by making turtles of different sizes as Royal icing transfers. I used Americolor Gold from Artisan Accents Coco Brown, and later a food safe pen to draw the pattern on the shell, finalizing with a spray of PME luster.

For the cookies, some of the steps are shown below…

A little piping of the outline tied the cookie well, I believe…

DESIGN #3
LITTLE FISHES

Inspiration for those came from this image. I changed the colors a bit to use the same icing I made for the surf boards, so that the set would look similar. Then it was a reasonably simple design to pipe and ice. I went back and outlined the design again and sprayed the whole cookie with PME luster, for a little bling.