Christmas Day will arrive all too quickly for us at Juniper Cakery so we shall now be taking our well-earned holiday from virtually anything work related as we celebrate the festive season! This time of year is always crammed with lots of magic for us as we attempt to re-cooperate from working 7 days a week at 17 hours a day (indeed) and enjoy a birthday, Christmas festivities, Hanukkah and a sparkling New Year too!
We’ve been especially busy this season due to refurbishing our design space and our consultation room. Things are still not quite finished yet, but we did manage to get our studio Christmas tree up, decorated and twinkling with lights. So before we bid adieu to cakes, cupcakes, cookies and anything else confection-related here’s a little sneak peek at our Christmas cheer!
As the snow clouds draw in closer to the UK and the 25th quickly races around the corner we wish everyone out there a wonderful holiday season with plenty of happiness and as the age-old quote says… eat, drink and be merry!
Winter is almost in full swing and with the icy and blustery weather making it’s way around us in the UK at moment we’ve got quite the cake for you to re-create at home! Our fun and festive Melting Snowman Cake is not only quick and painless to make, but it can even be adapted so that you can decorate it with the kids over the holidays! You can even set out lots of different sweets and candies and just leave them to let their creativity do all the work. Why not head on over to our FREE tutorial via the Craftsy.com blog for more!
Decoration-wise we love the idea of little fondant ear-muffs nestled onto the head in place of a knitted bobble hat. Some other adorably festive ideas would be to use chocolate coated pretzel sticks for twig arms, add a fondant robin perched on top of the head, wrap a sugar paste / fondant scarf around your snowman’s face or add some extra customisation with different colors.
For a festive cake decorating party fit for children (and big kids aka grown-ups) why not pre-ice your snowman with the board, melted snow and hat before supplying lots of mini cookies and candies with some royal icing and to the table for guests to decorate with!
Adding a knitted look to winter inspired cakes needn’t be a chore full of silicone moulds and matching up sections of sugar paste / fondant. In our Melting Snowman Cake tutorial we share a quick and easy technique that helps mimic the look of cosily knitted items!
Gingerbread houses are always instant crowd pleasers at any Christmas party so why not head on over to the Craftsy.com blog for our handy tutorial on how to create your own simple yet sweet gingerbread cookie house! It’s really not as scary as it seems. All you need is your own go-to gingerbread cookie recipe, some time, a little planning and lots of royal icing!
We created our own first gingerbread house of the season with rustic forest green royal icing flooded onto each cookie panel and nestled the entire house into a sweet snowdrift of textured royal icing. Flooding is a great technique, if a little tricky for a beginner. It’s fantastic for adding a good amount of colour to your gingerbread house before you even begin to decorate it!
Our quick step-by-step tutorial via Craftsy.com’s blog features some advice on what candies to use, how to assemble and ‘glue’ the walls together and even a few ideas on some treats and goodies may be good for a more glamorous gingerbread house design.
For the first week of December we helped everyone get into the festive spirit with our cookie week of tutorials that included spiced snowflake sugar cookies, rustic winter trees and festive Christmas wreaths. Now it’s cake week and today we share how you can create a fun knitted winter hat at home complete with an adorable fluffy pom pom on top! Christmas is always a fabulous time for fun novelty treats so this vibrant cake is perfect for any lively get-together. You can even add cute cut out faces and extra color to make this design great for the kids’ table.
How to decorate a cosy woolly hat cake!
Materials and tools needed…
1 x half ball/hemisphere shaped cake on a decorated board or drum
Red sugar paste/fondant
White sugar paste/fondant
Snowflake plunger cutters
Edible glue
Veining tool
Cocktail stick
Pizza or pastry cutter
Paintbrush
Cake smoother
Step 1:
Take some white fondant and add a peaked shape on top of your ball tool. Smooth down any bumps with a cake smoother.
Step 2:
Roll out red sugar past/fondant and cover your ball cake. Trim the excess fondant neatly.
Step 3:
Take some more red fondant and shape into a thick rope before using a rolling pin to flatten it out. It doesn’t matter if the strip rolls out a little uneven as it will just add a thick fabric look to your hat! If you keep the fondant rolled out to a slightly chunkier thickness when you add a knitted pattern it will look more ‘soft’.
Step 4:
To make the pom pom roll out a ball of white fondant and and texture with a cocktail stick with a scratching/jabbing motion. Attach to the top with a cocktail stick and some edible glue.
Step 5:
Add a knitted stitch look by making V-shaped notches with a veining tool around the hat. Keep in mind the direction of the knit!
Step 6:
Cut out some sugar paste/fondant snowflakes and attach using some edible glue and a paintbrush! Of course, you’re more than welcome to use cut out stars, trees, holly berries and leaves, bows, stripes etc.
This fun cake is perfect for a more novelty themed Christmas party or dinner plus you can customise it to suit any colour palette or theme. Why not cover a cake board with thick royal icing before nestling a finished hat on top to mimic a woolly hat lost in the snow! We love the idea of re-creating this cake in a deep forest green before adding ochre or light tan fondant star patterns and pom pom before painting with edible gold paint for a truly glistening cake.
This best part about this cake is that it’s relatively simple and fast. We decorated this design in 1 hour and 10 minutes, but obviously if you’re less experienced or you’re adding further decorative accents this may take up to a half day to finish; which still leaves enough time for a well-deserved rest so you can admire your work!
Creating cookies as gorgeous and delicious Christmas gifts is a wonderfully fun and sweet (pun fully intended) thing to do. Every year we love the fresh aroma of heart-warming gingerbread cookies or our spiced sugar cookies filling every room. As an extra tutorial, because we’re oh so generous, we’re showing you how to decorate festive Christmas wreath cookies using royal icing (click here for our recipe) and some simple circle shaped cookies!
Outline and flood ice your cookie with white royal icing. You can skip this step if you’re a little anxious about flood icing, but if you’d like to give this technique a try have a look at our rustic Christmas tree tutorial (and simply flood with icing the consistency of honey and skip the texturing step… you’ll need the cocktail sticks and teaspoon for this). Leave to set for 12-24 hours. You can get away with adding extra royal icing decorations after a few hours of flooding your cookie so long as you’re careful.
Step 2:
Take some green royal icing and using a piping bag fitted with a small leaf tip add some textured leaves in the ring around your cookie on top of your flooded icing. Pipe so that the leaves hang over the edge of your flooded icing.
Step 3:
Keep adding lots of lovely green royal icing leaves to make the wreath fuller. Leave to set.
Step 4:
To add a frosty looks pipe out lots of small dots of white royal icing onto your wreath’s foliage. Leave to set!
Step 5:
With a piping bag filled with red royal icing and fitted with a ribbon piping tip pipe out your bow’s loops. You can either pipe out a horizontal figure of eight at the top centre part of your wreath or two horizontal ovals that meet.
Step 6:
Add the tails to your festive red bow by piping out two wavy lines of ribbon from the base of your loops.
The great thing about whipping these festive wreath cookies is that they’re perfect for a traditional themed Christmas dessert table and they look oh so heart-warming packaged in glimmering treat boxes or bags trimmed with holiday ribbon!
Whipping up sugar cookies is definitely something fun and tasty to do when the colder winter months are just around the corner. We especially look forward to creating our delicious spiced sugar cookies (our thinner and crunchier variant of the traditional gingerbread cookie) once it’s time of pull out all of the festive trimmings! This festive season we’ve shared our popular spiced sugar cookie recipe and now we’re showing you how to flood ice them and add a wonderful texture to help create rustic inspired Christmas tree cookies!
Visit our blog post here for our go-to royal icing recipe. We use this recipe for every royal icing project as it’s pretty adjustable and we’ve never had any issues with it’s consistency. If you find your icing too thick add a little lemon juice and test. If you feel as though your royal icing may be too thin simple add a little icing sugar to thicken!
How to royal ice rustic Christmas tree cookies…
Materials needed…
Royal icing the consistency of thick runny honey
Piping bag
small round plain piping tip
Cookies (either sugar or gingerbread)
Cocktail stick
Step 1:
Always work one cookie at a time as you don’t want your royal icing outline to dry out before you flood your icing! Begin by outlining the cookie using a piping bag fitted with a small writing piping tip. Don’t touch the cookie with the piping tip or bag as this is the wrong way to create an outline and will lead to shaky lines! You want to start by touch the cookie and lightly piping out a little icing before lifting the royal icing and bag off the cookie. Keep pressingly and piping icing out but move above the cookie so that the icing falls tidily onto the surface!
Step 2:
With your outline still wet outline add a teaspoon (approx.) of matching royal icing inside and help move the icing around using a cocktail stick. If you’re not looking to create the texture look then need to aim for a smooth surface. It sometimes helps to drop the cookie a few times on it’s back to help level out the icing.
Step 3:
To create a bumpy texture use a cocktail stick to dab into the icing creating small peaks on the cookie!
Step 4:
Add some little white royal icing dots clustered in sections on the iced Christmas trees to help create a snow covered look perfect for the winter season. To create the frosted look use a dry paintbrush to then lightly drag one edge of a still wet royal icing dot outwards.
Before adding further royal icing on top of flood work it’s always best to wait from 6-10 hours or else you’ll risk damaging your hard work. Finish with some brown royal icing flood work underneath for the tree trunks or perhaps even leave the trunks un-iced if your in a hurry!
These cookies are perfect set out on a festive cake stand at a party or placed into treat bags finished with bows to be given away as delicious Christmas treats! If you’d like to make Christmas tree ornaments remember to cut or poke a hole into the cookie right after you’ve cut the dough out.
