cookie platter

APRIL INSPIRATION POST: COLORS AND SHAPES

sallybr2 Comments

As I mentioned, Marlyn from Montreal Confections has been proposing challenges for her cookie-followers to work on their own. Here is the assigned task for the month of April.

That was it, my friends. Two shapes. A few colors. Go to work.

After much mental back and forth, hyperventilation, monologues around the house, I came up with a flower composition to use all colors. Had a few issues with the fine lines, but other than that, I am reasonably satisfied with my cookie set…

It all started by planning the petals around the center, and adding one leaf, making it easier to incorporate the electric green…

Once the cookies were baked and the colors mixed, the fun began… Flooding the different components and adding some wet on wet for the center.

For the final details, everything had to set for a few hours, and the colors mixed in piping consistency. I hit the dark green so well that I spent a few minutes doing a short version of the Happy Dance.
Look at those green lines! Don’t you love them? I thought so.

All that was left was some colorful piping to use the other colors, and tie the whole design together.

I really love these little challenges because they force me to do something on my own. Yet another thing to love about cookie decorating. Getting out of your comfort zone to explore the universe of colors and shapes.

Thank you, Marlyn!

MY FIRST COOKIE PLATTER

sallybr4 Comments

This would be perfect for a Mother’s Day gift, don’t you think? Cookie platters can be made with sets of cookies especially designed for the purpose (as the clam petal in today’s example), or you can create a composite by grabbing cookie cutters you already own and coming up with your own unique design. To make my first platter, I followed an online class taught by Marlyn. It was set as a group meeting in which the participants could show their progress and ask questions. In other words: 2 hours of pure fun! You can join Marlyn’s Facebook page or Instagram account to get notification of her new classes, and also visit her youtube channel for many free tutorials available.

Materials used for this cookie platter:

Clam 3-petal cookie cutter + teardrop leaf cutter, any 3-inch round cutter and any mini-daisy cutter, with 5 or 6 petals, about 1.5 inches.

You can bake the leaves separated from the petals and place them together after baking, or do as I did, joining them as one cookie. They will end up as a solid single piece.

Choose your weapons and charge them…

Petals from the large central cookie and the small daisies are piped with stiff consistency Royal icing and a Wilton 104 tip. Everything else takes flooding consistency (about 15 seconds), and two tones per color, no need for tips. Thanks to Marlyn’s guidelines, I finally feel better about using the 104 tip.

Once everything is done, let the pieces set overnight…

It was a lot of fun to decorate live with Marlyn. She made it all seem very easy and simple, and was quite attentive to the timing so that no one was left behind. The pace was perfect. I learned a lot, and also realized that practice is everything. You can watch videos for hours and hours, but you won’t develop that “feel” for the consistency of your Royal icing until you grab the bag and try it yourself.

I close this post with one of many sayings by Marlyn:

Some days you make great cookies, some days you learn.