I really love creating these cookies :) The main important thing for me is, it's a good reminder that i need these in abundance every-single-day. The second thing is, i found it a really good practice session for me on two things: I get to practice my lettering and I get to play with lots of different moulds to create the flower accents all around the cookies :)

So to start off, flood your cookie with white flood icing, you don't have to stick with white, if you would rather have other icing colour feel free to play and experiment :)

Then you can either pipe the words directly in the middle of the cookie or you can outline them with an edible marker. Im not very good a free-hand so i found edible markers very handy to have to do things like these - see picture below. Make sure that the background icing is completely dry before you do this.

Lastly with an outline consistency icing pipe the words into the cookie - see the last picture.
We made the cookies in the same way for all 3 designs.

Then the fun begins....we just recently bought a whole bunch of moulds from eBay, and we decided to use it as flower accent for these cookies.

Umm...we might have gone a bit crazy overboard with making our flower accents....these are the collections of what we ended up with - see photo below. These were made with Pettinice fondant that we have in our pantry. You can also make them using modelling chocolate if you have some :)

I know what you were gonna say...we did go a tad 'flower frenzy' when we made these :P
These are the moulds we have to create those gorgeous flowers :)

So after we made those little fondant flowers, we just stick them on to the cookie in any way we like. No certain position, we just play with whatever we thought looks good on the cookie :)

If you have some left over fondant flowers after you have finished playing, don't throw them away. You can keep them in a container so you can use it again for your next cookie (im actually not sure how long you can keep them for, i need to google first), so i guess check them before you use it next time. They are made out of sugar so i think it should be okay but best to check first :)

Just to show you, we kept our fondant flowers in a container like this one - see below.

so there you go, we thought all the flowers goes really well as an accent in these kind of cookies.
Here are another closer look at the three cookies together :)

Hope you enjoy seeing these and that the tutorial are helpful to you. Have a great week! :)

The best thing about being in a cookie group is to have a bunch of awesome ladies that shares your passion about cookie-ing and having a wonderful support whenever you need any help, advice or anything cookie related :)

The next best thing is the cookie swap! :) I love receiving cookies from others and I also love creating some for them. I have to send my cookies to a cookie friend in Australia so what can be more appropriate than sending Koalas right? :P

I love these nerdy koalas, i specially love the black rimmed glasses and tapped-up in the middle :) One koala has a thicker rim in the glasses as she is more geekier than the other hahaha :P

Okay so lets go over how to decorate these cuties :) Start with marking the areas of the koala with edible marker. Then using medium consistency icing fill the inner ear, chest and inner feet areas with white colour icing, and let it dry.

Next step is to put medium consistency grey icing for her face and feet, let it dry for a bit (just until the top layer icing is crusted over), then add the reminder of the grey icing into the rest of the koala (outer ear, hands and bottom) - see the picture below.

Next step is to do the grey outline all around the koala, we use outline consistency grey icing - see the first picture on the left side.

Then lastly we added the pink bow and the black rimmed glasses and her eyes with black medium consistency icing.

There you go, step by step visual of how to decorate these cuties, and here is the finished result :)

Hope you'll have a koalaties week! ;-) (sorry can't resist! :P

We have been wanting to try making these eyelet lace cookies since we saw a video in Instagram.
So when we finally have a few spare cookies to play with we decided to give these a try :)

I love the texture of the lace part as the icing was really thin down, it sets with a light texture and made it look transparent which is really lovely. I'm not sure if you can see the texture clearly on this picture, hopefully you can 'just' see it :)

I really love the soft tones on these cookies. For these cookies we chose a soft blue background to compliment the white lace. You can create these lace on any cookie with any shape.

Here are the steps of how to make these the lace on the heart shape cookies:

Step 1: Fill the cookie with light blue flood icing and let it dry.
Step 2: With an outline consistency white icing piped the eyelet pattern on to the middle of the cookie.

We decided to go for a very simple pattern as this is our first experiment creating these cookies :)

So now the next step is to use a very dilluted/runny icing to fill the area. Use a very small amount of white royal icing and add more water to make it very runny. I've taken photos of the actual icing to show you how thin/runny the icing is, hopefully its noticeable from the photo

The next step is really fun to do, my lovely daughter loves doing this part (she is the best assistant ever!) take a paint brush and paint the area with the runny white icing - see photo below.

Even out the runny icing with the paint brush, you can keep pushing the icing along the lace areas, here is a closer look at my daughter painting the cookie with the runny icing :)

The first picture below is how the cookie looks like after you finished painting the runny icing. When you have finished that part, let it dry completely. Once it has dried and set, you will see a lovely texture that will resemble a transparent lace, it looks realy lovely. The runnier the white icing, the more rough the texture is going to set.

When the icing have dried add the dot on each side of the lace and add royal icing roses or flowers.

Making these cookies also gave us a chance to practice making royal icing roses, all we need is to cut up some baking paper into little pieces, stick them on top of a flower nail. This is what a flower nail looks like, you can twirl it around your fingers easily to create the roses.

With a tiny bit of icing piped a very stiff icing on to the top of the flower nail. Then start with piping the middle bud (see the second picture) and then continue to pipe the petals one layer at a time until it forms the shape of a rose - see picture below (please excuse the giraffe onesie in the background as my daughter was demonstrating the technique for this photos :P )

This is the finished rose, we use tip #101 for these roses. You can use tip #102 or #103 to create bigger petals or bigger roses :)

And these lot are the result of our practice to make royal icing roses...we made them in all sorts of different sizes just for practice ;-)

Its a matter of "practice makes perfect", the more you practice making them, the better and quicker you are at it :)

 So there you go, once the roses are dry and set, you can keep them in an airtight container and they will last for a long time. They are very handy to store, you can use them for decorating any cookies, cupcakes or cakes.

Hope you enjoyed these as much as we enjoyed making them ;-)

My lovely massage therapist has decided to move out of wellington and i'm so gutted! >.<

She has always looked after me really well and everytime i see her (which usually means i'm either in pain or very sore) she always makes me feel better. She is such an amazing lady with a gentle soul and healing hands.

So I've decided to make some cookies to show my appreciation to her and to say thank you for being so wonderful. I tried to think of something that she will love and to brighten her day...in the end we've decided these butterflies and half sunflower cookies will be the best for her ;-)

Creating these butterflies for her was so much fun, we get to experiment with wet on wet technique and pretty pattern for their wings :)

We started with the bottom wings, outline with cream flood icing as per the first picture on the far left.

Then fill each section with different colours, we choose earth colours for these butterflies, we add brown for the bottom section, yellow for the middle and white for the top section - see the middle picture below

Then take your scribe tool (or toothpicks if you dont have a scribe tool) and drag it along from the top to the bottom of the wet icing. While the icing is still wet add a dot of brown icing on the white section of the bottom wing and white the brown icing is still wet add another dot of yellow on top - see the 3rd picture.

After we finished with the bottom wings then we do the upper wings, flood the upper area with cream flood icing. Then while its still wet add 3 yellow dots along the side of the wings. While the yellow icing is still wet add the dark brown and white on top - see the second picture. Let this dry completely

The next step is to add the middle body of the butterfly. With medium consistency brown icing pipe along the body and the head of the butterfly - see the bottom row of pictures below.

The last step is to create lines in the top wings, use brown edible pen to draw lines along the inner wings.

Here are a closer look at the butterflies together :)

For the sunflower, we had to do a bit of frankencookie-ing as we don't have the cookie cutter for it, so we had to cut the dough using a normal flower cutter, cut it in half and re-attach the top bulb.

You can see from the photo below there is a line on the top of the cookie where we had to cut and re-attached (where we did the frankencookie) :P

I totally forgot to take a photo of the cookie dough when we were cutting it so I'm showing you how to cut it with paper....its the same way as you do with cookie dough, the only difference is you cut the dough with a sharp knife instead of using scissors:)

Okay so once the dough is baked, we start with the petals. I wanted multiple petals with varying length so i marked it with an edible pen and then piped the petals alternatively with medium consistency yellow icing (or 20 second icing) and let it dry - see picture below.

Once that is done, add brown medium consistency consistency icing (or 20 second icing) for the flower bulb. And lastly add the details of the petals and add little dots on the bulb - see picture below.

Here is a closer look at the hlaf sunflowers together :)

Of course we also took a close-up picture of the thank you cookie, i love the yellow roses that we made to decorate these plaque shape cookie :)

I just gave these cookies to my amazing therapist today when we said our goodbyes, i hope she will enjoy the cookies. Thank you so much for taking good care of me Prue, if you are reading this, just know that you will be missed ;-)

We made cookies for Sarah's baby shower :) It was a monkey theme in the invite as the baby will be born in the year of the monkey. So we created the cookies with the same theme, as well as the colour scheme which is brown & blue.

We took progress photo for one of our fave onesie. There are 2 ways of doing this, you can start with a white icing and flood the entire cookie with it and let it dry, or you can only flood the white icing for the top part, either way it will work. If you flood the entire area (including the bottom) you will have a thicker area for the bottom of the onesie.

The second part is to add 2 little triangle on top to create the collar, and put dark brown icing and while its still wet pipe white & light blue icing with a small tip (we used tip #1.5) - see picture below.

Then the next step is to pipe the blue tie and with an edible marker mark the area for the suspender.

The last step is to use a dark brown stiff icing, pipe the long line on each side to create the suspender and add a couple of small sugar pearl where it connects with the bottom part to give it little buttons. Lastly pipe the little fastener/snaps at the bottom of the onesie - see picture below.

For the onesies with the little monkey face in front of it, we made royal icing transfer. Its less risky to make a mistake this way, make sure you make a few extras if you ever want to make them as they are easily breakable. All you need is some baking paper and use your royal icing to create the transfer.

If you are using a picture as a guide you can put the paper with the picture underneath the baking paper so you can trace the picture that way. With these monkey we just freehand it (no picture) as it was pretty straight forward and easy. Here are the tiny monkey royal icing transfer :)

Here are the different style of onesies that we created for this set :)

How to make the baby stroller

Here they are together with the baby bottles :)

The simplest cookies in this set is probably the baby bib :) They are done in a couple of simple steps.

Step 1: Flood the cookie with blue icing and white its still wet pipe little dots of brown, white & green into the wet icing to create a polkadot pattern and let it dry.

Step 2: The second step is to use a dark brown outline consistency and pipe all the around the border and then add a small dot in between the grooves. Lastly stick one of the monkey royal icing transfer in the middle of the bib.

Here are the baby bibs cookies along with the monkey cookies :)

I love the plaque that says Baby Su, but my fave from the whole set is the little heart shape cookie with the teeny tiny baby feet :) Here is a closer look at the them together :)

Hope everyone at the baby shower like the taste of the cookies as well as the decorations :)

It's funny and quite liberating when you received a one liner request like this "Can you make pink cats and lamb cookies? the rest of the details are up to you, use your imagination".

Well that was unusual, so out of curiousity I had to go back and asked "why pink cats?" I have never seen any pink cats before...so her answer was that the person receiving the cookies as a gift is crazy about cats and lamb and she also loves everything pink so she requested custom cookies of pink cats and lamb specially for the birthday girl :)

This is what we came up with and hopefully it fullfilled the brief :P

We have made the kitty kat before and the only difference is the colours and we added the roses on the ear just to give it a feminin touch to add to the pink cats. So to make the pink polkadot kitty cat you can see the tutorial HERE.

So once we have done the base pink polkadot icing (see the tutorial on how to do the polkadot icing on the link above) all we did was add the white bow and the roses.

Here is the close-up of the kitty cats cookies :)

For the lamb, we were inspired by Sweetopia's little lamb post. Here is the breakdown of the step by step decorating process.

PS: please excuse the poor lighting on the photo, with the daylight savings ending i struggled to take the progress photo with a decent light as we do our decorating in the evenings and progress to the night times. So for the next few months you are likely to get more of the poor lighting photos :P

Step 1: Start with using a white flood icing on to the face and the legs of the lamb, and let it dry.
Step 2: Use either Wilton star tip, either #14 or 16 to create the lamb's wool. We decided to use tip#16 for this one. Cover the whole body area - see picture below for details.
Step 3: Lastly draw the eyes with black edible marker and add a pink bow.

You can make these cute little lamb with any star piping tips, just to show you a comparison between the two piping tips we have - Wilton #14 and #16. They are very similar and they both will work perfectly to make these lamb, in our case we used #16.

We love making the lamb, they are so cute and fun to make! Claudia certainly had fun piping the lamb's wool and it doesn't matter if you make mistakes it wont show because the lamb's wool are thick and they are not piped in any particular way...just fill the whole body with icing :)

Lastly, we packaged them up into a gift-box ready to be given to the birthday girl :)

Really hope she likes them! Have a great day everyone! ;-)

In all the excitement of all the Mother's Day activities yesterday we didn't get a chance to post our Mother's Day cookies....oh well, better late than never i suppose ;-)
We made this cookie set for my mother in law. We decided on peach and light blue and because she loves butterflies we had to include butterflies in the set :)

Here are the progress photo of how to make the roses, its fairly straight forward...flood the main rose area with peach flood icing and let it dry. Then add the petals on top (see picture below) and lastly add the leaf with green flood icing and outline the leaf with outline consistency icing.

We made them in peach and blue, here they are in a platter :)

For the butterfly, we started with cream colour flood icing in the middle of the wings, then with 'wet on wet' technique put the peach & blue icing on the wet cream colour icing (just three little dots on the side of the wings - see the picture below, and one dot on the bottom wings) then let it dry for a bit. Add the light blue icing around the border of the wings and let it dry, then lastly pipe the middle body and the antennae along with some dots and swirls to give some details in the wings (see photo below for details).

Here are the butterfly cookies complimented with the roses and heart shaped cookies :)

We also made alphabet cookies that spells "MOM" and we replaced the middle letter with one of the roses. Here is the close-up photo of the MOM cookies :)

And lastly, packaged it all up in a gift box ready to be given out as Mother's Day present :)

To all the wonderful mums out there, hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day filled with lost of love and surprises ;-)

Its Russ' birthday today and seeing that its officially an International Star Wars day of course we had to make him Star Wars cookies :)

The hardest part was hiding these cookies from him so that we can keep it as a surprise....and it has been quite a bit of a mission to do that, but thankfully the kids have been helping me by giving me warning when daddy just about to enter the kitchen so i can keep them hidden :P

Oh, and i also have to give a special shout of thank you to my dear friend Angie, as these cookies were made from a set of cookie cutter that she sent us all the way from Canada! We cannot buy these cutter anywhere in NZ or Australia, so thank you so much Angie...they are just adorable! ;-)

These are the 'Chibi' version of Star Wars, we think they are the 'cute version' of the Star Wars' characters :) So here are the result...we have Yoda, Princess Leia, Luke, Chewie, R2D2 & 3CPO

My favorite from this set is Princess Leia, she is so cute and simple to make :) So here is the progress photos of how to make her.

Step 1: Use a brown colour 20 second icing to fill her hair/buns area :)
Step 2: Fill her face area with flesh colour icing
Step 3: Add her eyes with black icing, pull a tiny bit of the black icing on the sides of the eyes with the scribe tool to create her eyelashes. Also add her lips with red icing. You can also mark off the area where you want to put the swirls in her hair with an edible marker.
Step 4: Lastly with a stiff consistency brown icing pipe the swirls in her hair to create the look of a bun on each side and on the top - see picture below.

The next one on my favorite list is the classic R2D2, he is also reasonably simple to make and he is always been a favorite of ours ;-)

Here is the step by step progression photo on how to make him:
Step 1: Fill the bottom part with white icing, mark off the area where you want to leave un-iced with edible marker.
Step 2: Fill the top part with grey icing, apart from the marked areas.
Step 3: With blue icing create the markings on his body - see picture below. We use a red sugar pearl for the red dot you see in the middle part.
Step 4: Pipe the finishing touches - see picture below.

Here are the set of character's together :)

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to take a photo of the cookies all packaged-up in the gift box as i had to do this in a hurry and I had to go away for a work trip today. However I did get a very lovely message this morning while i was boarding the plane from him saying that he loves it and he thinks the cookies were amazing...so i think overall we did good ;-)

Hope you have had a great day today and may the fourth be with you!