cookie tutorial Archives - Juniper Cakery | Cakes in Hull & Yorkshire!

20th December 2017 // 0 Comments

Our Gingerbread House Cookie Tutorial via Craftsy.com!

Gingerbread houses are a definite seasonal favourite BUT they can be tricky to assemble and decorate. Especially for beginners or anyone pressed for time. So… say hello to our flat gingerbread house cookie tutorial. It’s available for free over on the fabulous Craftsy.com blog! We love anything cute, stylish and that makes life a little easier. These 2D cookies are definitely that. Instead of measuring each panel so they fit perfectly together, holding your breath anxiously while assembling and then wondering why your house won’t stand up why not make 2D house cookies. Another major win is that because they sit flat you don’t need to worry about royal icing dripping down your work. So head on over to the Craftsy blog for our full gingerbread house cookie tutorial!

You can add cool texture to your own gingerbread house cookies. We opted for brick work and a rustic wood grain effect using these FMM impression mats! You can try embossing stars or pretty snowflakes onto your designs using small plunger cutters, even texture mats or mini cookie cutters.

You can use lots of different things to help give any Christmas cookie you’re making a winter-y look. We’ve used sugar, sanding sugar, nonpareils, sugar strands, confetti sprinkles, snowflake sprinkles, plunger cut snowflakes and shimmering lustre dust too. It’s festive season so don’t be afraid to even use ALL of them. Stick to white when working with creating an edible snow look and it should just look lovely and textured!

Give each cookie a little ‘personality’ with individual decorations. We used gold stars, a pretty holly leaf wreath and a snowflake. You can even pipe party guest’s names onto each cookie and use them as cute place settings! If you’re stuck for time how about using some pre-made icing decorations. We love Wilton’s range of gingerbread people, snow characters and Christmas stockings!

So for some extra treats this holiday season with a little less stress check out our gingerbread house cookie tutorial on Craftsy.com!

Tutorial: Sequin Christmas Stocking Cookies!

There are these Christmas stockings that seem to exist in our heads and we’ve searched for them for two years now to no avail. It’s one of those moments where you think you’ve spotted them somewhere, but then you’re not sure if you completely made them up. These dream stockings would be utterly perfect for our office. We’d stuff them full of pink, white and gold (our brand colours of course) treats and wrapped gifts. Then nestle them on our shared desk like pair of Christmas obsessed workaholics. They’re gold sequin (obviously), but not that polyester lamé type fabric with fake sequin ‘stickers’ on it. Oh no. Glistening gold stitched on sequins. On top of this magical stocking is then a cuff of soft white fake fur. Simple really. Anyway, we settled for the (sort of) next best thing this year. Our dream Christmas stockings… as cookies. Plus we even put together a cool tutorial on how to create them!

Christmas stocking cookie tutorial!

Materials and tools needed…

Baked and cooled stocking shaped cookies (we used this cookie cutter and this recipe)
15 second consistency royal icing
Stiff consistency royal icing
Small round piping tip
Disposable piping bags
Edible gold paint (or edible gold dust mixed with rejuvenator spirit)
Paint brush (that’s only been used in cake decorating)
Confetti sprinkles
Cocktail sticks

01: One of the first steps is to dust off any excess flour from your cookies. This is usually left behind from rolling out your cookie dough on a floured surface just before you cut, chill and bake them. Any left over flour on the surface of your cookies makes them harder to ice. If left when you go to pipe your royal icing it won’t stick or ‘anchor to the cookie’.

02: Now with your 15 second royal icing (we used a mustard / ochre tinted icing so that is would be a lot easier for everyone to actually see this process in the photographs) pipe an outline around the main body of your stocking cookie. Don’t include the cuff area at the top.

Tip!

Always work one cookie at a time. If you outline all your cookies at once and then go to flood them you’ll be left with a visible outline that because it crusted over and began to dry won’t merge in with the flooded icing.

03: Now with the same 15 second consistency royal icing flood inside the outline. All you need to do is pipe your royal icing within the piped outline from step 02. To even and move around your icing use a cocktail stick in small circular motions.

04: Use your cocktail stick to pop any pesky little air bubbles that appear in your icing. These can also look like small dark ‘shadowy’ dots if they’re underneath the surface. Just use the pointed end of your cocktail stick to pop those too.

05: Now take your confetti sprinkles and layer on top of your royal iced stocking. You can even use star shaped sprinkles too if you have them. We work with two sizes (6mm and 4mm) of white sugar confetti sprinkles for our sequins. White is harder to find, but rainbow should work just as fine. Once added put your cookies aside to set.

06: Once they’ve set you can paint the decorated part of your cookie gold. It’s important to wait until your royal icing is fully dry as you’ll end up with a bit of a mess if you try to paint onto wet royal icing.

07: With your stiffer consistency royal icing pipe some messy blobs on the cuff section of your stoking cookie.

08: Add a furry texture to this section of royal icing using a cocktail stick to drag parts of the stiffer royal icing outwards. Once done leave to set. This could take anywhere from around 1-10 hours depending on the humidity of where you live. Sugar is hygroscopic which means it soaks in moisture from the atmosphere around it making it soften. The dryer the environment the better!

Yay! You should now have some gorgeously stylish Christmas cookies once you’ve decorated your way through an entire batch! Give your Christmas stocking cookies a little twist by using cute star sprinkles instead, try snowflakes and paint them silver or add royal icing holly berries and leaves to adorn the tops of them.

Halloween Tutorial: Easy Peasy Monster Cookies!

Whilst it’s always fun to have a bigger and more time consuming project on the go for the holiday season sometimes a quick tutorial is all you need for some instantly fun sweets! This is where our easy peasy monster cookies tutorial comes in. Seriously, all you need are circle cookies and some royal icing. In fact you can make this even more ridiculously simple and decorate with fondant and pre-made candy eyes by Wilton instead. Check out our step-by-step guide below for some sugar cookies that are scarily simple to make!

Easy peasy monster cookies tutorial!

Royal icing consistencies explained…

15 second royal icing - This kind of icing has a good fluidity to it, but it’s still nice and stable. It’s perfect for piping outlines AND flooding which cuts down on icing time, materials and mess. All you need to do is to test your royal icing and adjust it. When you drag a butter knife through a bowl of royal icing it should take just 15 seconds for the icing to pool back together. If it’s taking too long add a few drops of water at a time, mix in and test. To quick? Add a teaspoon of sifted icing sugar, mix and test.

Piping consistency royal icing - Piping consistency is a little stiffer than 15 second. We aim for a consistency close to that of toothpaste. It’s also a great consistency for any 3d type detail work… just like the whites of the eyes on these cool cookies! This kind of icing shouldn’t pool or spread. It should hold it’s shape well. If it’s too stiff add a couple drops of water, mix together and test it. Too sloppy… then add a teaspoon of sifted icing sugar, mix and test.

Materials and tools needed…

Freshly baked and cooled circle shaped cookies (Need a sugar cookie recipe?)
Brightly coloured royal icing in 15 second consistency
Brightly coloured fondant (optional)
White royal icing in piping consistency
Black edible sugar pearls
Candy eyes (optional)
Cocktail sticks
Small round piping tip (we used a PME Supatube size 2.5)
Disposable piping bags

01: Fit a disposable bag with some bright coloured royal icing and pipe an outline around the perimeter of your circle cookie. Remember to work one cookie at a time.

02: As soon as you’ve piped the outline with the same bag, tip and icing flood in the centre of your cookie.

03: Now use a cocktail stick in circular motions to ease any royal icing out to the outline. You’ll also need to get a good even level of royal icing so moving it around with your cocktail stick will help this happen.

Tip!

You can also get pesky air-bubbles appearing as your work. To get rid of these just use your cocktail stick to burst them. They can be obvious bubbles on top of your icing or they can appear as small dark circular shadows in or underneath the icing.

04: Leave your iced sugar cookies to set for a little bit If you pipe your eyeballs onto the still wet icing you will get a bit of a molten looking mess. By piping onto icing that has already set a bit you’ll get a great 3D effect!

05: Take your stiffer white royal icing and pipe small-medium sized rounds all over the surface of your iced cookie. You can add as many eyes as you like too.

Tip!

If your white stiff icing forms a bit of a peak at the tips you can flatten or smooth these over with a lightly dampened paint brush. Always use paint brushes, however, that are only ever used on food items.

06: Finally add black sugar pearls to the whites of your monster cookies whilst the white royal icing is still wet to finish each eyeball!

Tip!

You can pipe little black dots of stiff royal icing instead, but utilising things such as sprinkles of edible pearls are a great and quick way to add detail. We use them all the time. If you want to add cute rosy cheeks (wow that’d make one terrifying monster right?) to your cookies you can even add 2 large pink confetti sprinkles.

One of the things we love about these cookies is that they are amazing to customise! Add rainbow confetti sprinkles to make monstrous dots on it’s skin, pipe a curved line of upside down royal icing teardrops for a gruesome grin, or attach jelly candy fangs on top for a devilish smile!

cookie tutorial

Our Gingerbread House Cookie Tutorial via Craftsy.com!

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Tutorial: Sequin Christmas Stocking Cookies!

Christmas stocking cookie tutorial!

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Halloween Tutorial: Easy Peasy Monster Cookies!

Easy peasy monster cookies tutorial!

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