Vintage is always a wonderfully popular theme for weddings, parties and afternoon tea get-togethers. We created these gorgeously sweet and fun vintage teapot cookies inspired by retro designs for an afternoon tea wedding reception recently. They were such a pleasure for us to make and just because we’re generous you can even head over to the Craftsy.com blog for our full tutorial on how to re-create these pretty treats yourself!
Vintage teapot cookies
These sugar cookies were a lovely and fragrant Sicilian lemon oil infused batch which, of course, made the kitchen small incredible! We added a hint of natural lemon extract to the royal icing also just to accentuate the citrus scent and flavour.
For these lovely cookies we were asked to create wedding favours that reflected the couple’s fun afternoon tea themed reception which included toasted scones, light colours, polka dots, pots of tea, fresh flowers, finger sandwiches and vintage teapot centre pieces.
We were a little inspired by our favourite Wedgwood teapot that features in the photographs alongside our cookies. It was perfect - a clean and simple yet retro-style design, gold accents and spring-like colours.
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.
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.
We know it’s not even autumn yet (due September 22nd no less), but we couldn’t help but begin to feel ever so festive and ready for winter when working on this silver vintage lace inspired wedding cake! It certainly was a delight for us to design this cake from the strands upon strands of pearlescent fondant pearls to the hand-piped royal icing lace design.
When creating this tiered cake we took inspiration from vintage lace, Wedgwood silverware, soft fabric corsages and strings of pearls. The main focus needed to be on the centre of the cake so we began sketching out three tiered designs that played with different cake depths and proportions before settling on a cake that utilised a deep middle tier.
To further draw attention to the centre of the cake, but not overload the overall design with too much fussy detail we looked at small repeat patterns in vintage lace and quickly sketched out a rough version of what we’d need to re-create using small blossom cutters and royal icing. Utilising tiny flower cutters is a great way to mark and plan out a lace design on a cake.
To finish we decided to add a little softness to the top with a ruffled fantasy flower created using thinned flower paste circles gently ‘balled’ and teased in delicate white frills. Due to the tiny blossom lace design that features as the main design aspect of this cake we kept the flower topper simple and unassuming.
As the months have gradually gotten colder this cake has only added to our excitement for winter; one of our favourite seasons. We love how the shimmering pearls mimic expertly rolled snowballs and that from a distance the royal icing piped lace could be frosty snowflakes!
