Cookie Decorating For Beginners: Create Incredible, Edible Art

1. Introduction: The funny thing is I don't actually consider myself an artist, although I consider this edible art. But I think that's what's fun about it, that it's so easy and approachable that anybody can do it. Hi, I'm Laurie. I'm also known as the Icing Artist, and I have a YouTube channel where I make amazing desserts. Today, I am really excited to share with you all the fundamentals of cookie decorating. I especially love cookies, because I find them to be like little canvases. Literally, anything you can imagine, you can create it on a cookie. I am 100 percent self-taught, it has been a figuring out process. I have no formal training, I've just been taught through looking at things online. My favorite thing is definitely challenging myself way beyond my skill point and ending up with something I'm so proud of. The things that we're going to touch base on are going to be flatting cookies, doing wet on dry flatting, wet on wet flatting, doing a lot of different details, we're even getting to doing some stencils. I have taken every cookie design that I could think of, breaking them apart into the different skills that you can do, that then you can apply to literally any cookie design. I hope everybody takes this class, honestly. I think that there's so much to learn with cookie art. I was so intimidated at the beginning, looking at these extraordinary cookies, thinking there's no way that my skill level could make something like that. I was blown away that with just of this few different techniques, you can really create anything. I am so excited that you decided to join me at this class, so let's get started. 2. Decorating Essentials: The nice thing about cookie decorating is you don't actually need a lot of tools. Pretty well a piping bag and paper template to cut your cookies will work. But there are other tools that I like that make my life easier. One thing is just a cup that I can wrap my piping bad around, so it helps me put icing in the bag, which I will show you after. I also have these little clips. You can just get them from the Dollar store, but they clip on the back of your bag so your icing doesn't go pouring out at the end and it keeps it fresh from drying out or anything. I have this fancy cookie scribe, which I'm vibing off the colors here. But it's just going to blend all of your icing together. But realistically, a toothpick is going to do the exact same thing, that's the thing. You can play around with different tools that you need and that you like. But all that's going to work whenever I'm coloring my icing, I like using a gel-based food coloring. Any brand is going to work. But basically a gel-based food coloring is just a really concentrated color. It's going to be a lot better than those little droplets you get at the grocery store because those ones have a lot of water in them. It's going to really dilute your icing and change the consistency, which I'm going to get to in a minute. How important consistency is with that cookie decorating. When it comes to cookie cutters, you can cut out any kind of shape you want. I like the metal ones compared to plastics, I feel like it gives out really clean cut. But you can also just use a paper template. I like using cookie cutters for all the shapes that you know you're going to be making lots of times, invest in cookie cutter for a $. But the ones that are you're only going to make once in a blue moon, you just have to make like five of one cookie, just cut a paper template, so you don't have a drawer full of cookie cutters. That's least what I do because I tend to collect way too many cookie cutters. 3. Preparing to Decorate: Let's talk sugar cookie dough. I'm going to leave all of my recipe in the class notes down below, but this is my favorite dough recipe. It is super easy to work with. I like it because you can work with it straight out of the mixer the same night, or you can put it in the fridge for the next day or the next week. It really doesn't matter. This one I've had been chilling overnight, and it's good to roll out. I like to wrap mine in Saran wrap, so that way it doesn't dry out any of the edges. Whenever I'm rolling out sugar cookies, I always use a little dust of flour on my table, so it's going to stop it from sticking to the table or on my rolling pin. I'm using a big heavy duty marble rolling pin. I feel like the weight really helps getting it really a nice flat shape. When I'm rolling out the thing that I'm looking for, is to get a nice even thickness. I like about a quarter inch, so I'm just rolling front-to-back and side-to-side over and over. I just take my hands and push in these dried edges. I don't want any of these broken crisp edges because that's going to come out in my cookies. I just re-flatten it out with my hands, and then go back in with my rolling pin. There's something so relaxing about cookie decorating because you're rolling out the dough and then you're piping everything. I find everything is not fast pace. Everything is slow pace, so it's nice to do it. Almost like meditative. We've got pretty well and even consistency. I can feel with my hand that I'm not really feeling any high points. I'm ready to go with my cookie cutter. This one is a metal cookie cutter. It has that nice sharp edge, which is going to give me a nice clean edge when I cut out my cookie. Depending on the cookie cutter, you can give it a little shake. Sometimes you can pick them up if you pinch it, other times you can't. We're going to come underneath it with a spatula. So when you're cutting out using a paper template, you're going to need a very sharp knife. I like a sharp little paring knife. I just trace along the outside edge. When you see you've got a perfect shape, and now we're just going to take the cookie dough away from the cookie, so we're able to lift them up off the table. I'm only cut out two cookies right now so I can show you what that looks like. I've got my baking sheet here that I've already put parchment paper on. I always bake with parchment paper. It's going to help your cookies not stick to the pan. It's always my go-to. Now, you notice with this cookie compared to this one, this one has beautiful clean lines. This one, the edges seem like they're sad. They're sad edges. We're just going to clean them up. I just take my finger, and I push in all these edges, and it just smashes the cookie dough back in shape. If you think that you've come out of shape a little bit, you can always just check it with your template to make sure you haven't gone off path. I just pick it up and put that on my baking tray. Now that we've got the cookies down part, we're ready to move onto the icing. But first I'm going to clean up all of these cookie tools. This is my royal icing. You might know royal icing from doing gingerbread houses. It's the icing that when you pipe it on something, it dries rock hard, and that's exactly what we love with cookie decorating. But I have two main consistencies that I like to work with. One is a flooding consistencies, that when I pipe it on a cookie, it's going to flood together and be really seamless and flawless. I've got another one that's for piping details. The difference is this one's more watery, this one's more stiff, and you can do that when you're making your recipes. Again, all the recipes are going to be in the class notes down below. I think one of the big question is, how do you know you have the right consistency of icing? Well, there's a few different ways that you can tell, but one of the best ways for flooding is 15-second icing is what I like to work with. All that means is basically, if I drag a tool through it, how many seconds does it take for it to get perfectly flood again so you can't see any of those lines. For me, after I've dragged it, I count down from 15, and if that's the right amount, then it'll be the perfect icing. Now, if it's flooding together too quickly under our 15-second mark, you need to add a little bit more icing sugar to it to bring it a little bit stiffer because otherwise it's too watery. But if you find that it's taking really long time for those lines to come together and it fail to level out, you can just add a little bit of water at a time. I mean like half a teaspoon at a time. A little bit of water goes a long way with royal icing, and that's going to get you the right consistency. With piping consistency, it's personal preference, which I know is really challenging, but it is. The best way to test it to actually put in a piping bag and to see what shapes you can pipe with and test it out that way. But you're just looking for a consistency that isn't going to totally blend together. That's going to hold a little bit of shape, but isn't going to be impossible to pipe. Whenever I'm not using the royal icing, I mean a couple of minutes, you need to cover it with Saran wrap because this stuff dries so quickly. I just cover it. I push the Saran wrap right down to the royal icing, so where there's no dried edges. That's going to keep it airtight until I'm ready to use it. Now, when it comes to bagging real icing, I like to put it just over my hand like that and just fill the right piping bag just like that. But it can be easier, especially at the beginning, if you just put it over a cup. Then you have got both your hands free. I can pick this up, and I can just fill it this way. You're just going to take your icing and then just plop it right into your piping bag. You don't want too much because over filling your piping bag is going to make it really hard when you're piping. Give the bag a shape. I'm just going to take one of my little big clips and put it on the end, and when I'm ready to start decorating my cookies, I just cut off a little tip at the top. We have our cookies, we have our icing, and now it is finally time for the fun part, which is the decorating. 4. Royal Icing Mastery: Royal icing could be a little bit finicky to work with, so I need to teach you guys some troubleshooting as well as some tips and tricks for success. Here I have the wrong consistency of royal icing, which I know sounds backwards. But I think one of the most common problems that I ran into when I was trying to flood a cookie was if you have the wrong consistency, it's not going to flood very nicely. What I mean here is this one is a little bit stiffer than I would like, which means it's going to dry much quicker leaving me less of an open time to perfectly flood it together. I'm just going to pipe it as if I would flood a cookie except using too stiff of the consistency. Filling in some of those gaps. Now I'm going to go in and like I would normally, right now I should be able to start smoothing it and seeing the icing coming together, except you're really just seeing a bunch of swirls on the cookie. Can I get it to work? Maybe if I try to work with it enough and work extremely quickly, I might be able to have it come together. But what I'm going to notice is you're going to have still a lot more bumps in the icing from where your tool was dragging through it, you might not have perfect lines where your border's meeting the flooded icing in the middle. If you're noticing that you can really see that borderline where you flooded a cookie that's probably because your icing is too stiff, or maybe you're not working quickly enough in blending those two lines together. I've got it. You can see that it is fully covered. I'm trying to shake it down, but it's not falling down flat, you can still see all about texture and that's because this icing's a little bit too stiff. Let's get into what the right consistency is. The perfect consistency is something that I like to call 15-second icing. I know that sounds a little bit confusing, but what I mean is if I drag a tool through my icing like this, just making some lines, I wait and I count down 15 seconds, for how long that I can't see any of these lines that I've just created and I'll lay perfectly flat again. If you've noticed that they've come together in less than 15 seconds, your icing might be too thin. If it's not coming together after like 20 seconds, it's probably too thick. Now, everybody likes different consistency icings that are working with, so you can pick what works best for you, but this is the consistency that I find works best for me. If you have too thick of a consistency you want to add little bit of water at a time and just mix it up until it's thinned out, if you've gone too far and you've blended out too much, just add a little bit of powdered sugar into it and mix that up and that'll help stiffen it. To color my royal icing, I'm just using a gel-based food coloring. That is my favorite because it doesn't change the consistency of my icing at all and gives me beautiful, bright, vibrant colors and I just start off by adding one drop at a time because this color goes a long way. As I notice it, if I think that this pink is a little bit too light then I can just give a little shake, add in a drop and you can see how thick that color is, it's very concentrated. Then just fold it into my icing. You really need to make sure that you're working this color into your icing that you have no streak, so I'm just coming around, going outside the bowl and then pushing down across the center to really make sure that that color is nice and even. If I'm working with icing over a couple days, sometimes I notice my color is not blended together fully in the bag, you can see it separating, you might see a lot of bubbles in your icing, and you can still save it from here. I won't pipe with that because any discoloration that you can see in the bag is just going to come out in your cookie. What I'd like to do is just cut off the tip of the bag, squeeze it out into a container, and then just mix it up to make sure that we've got all the same color coming through, that everything is blended together really nicely, and then I just re-bag up. It's ready to work with again. You can see exactly what I'm talking about. Here are some of my practice cookies. I had cookies that I've been decorating over a couple of days, so the royal icing was sitting in the bags, so I had separated a little bit instead of bringing it back into a container mixing it, I was like it's fine, I'm just going to pipe it. Here you can see some of the difference in color, where you can see all of these streaks coming through, you can see the streaks here and that's all that is. It's not bad, but it's not the look that I was going for. I wanted one fully consistent color and that's the marble look that you're going for, so if you see that happening with your cookies, just pour it into a container, mix it up, and re-bag it, and it's going to save your life. Royal icing dries really quickly, so it's very important that you don't have any royal icing sitting like this without having something cover it. I always like to take a piece of saran wrap and I just push it down till it meets the icing. I go all the way along making sure that my saran wrap is pushed right down onto the icing, and then I cover that. But if I'm not ready to take my icing out of the bags or anything, I'll just take my bagged icing and put that in a Ziploc bag and I seal it that way. But if you have piping tips that you're working with and you don't want those to dry out and get hard, I just wet piece of paper towel, this is just water in here, and then I roll that around and the moisture and paper towel is going to keep your icing from drying out. I'll do the same thing with this one because I don't want to take out my icing out of this beautiful piping bag that I've got here for my ice cream cone, and I'm just going to wrap around that and I can put this in a Ziploc bag just like that. That's how you take care of your royal icing and make sure it never dries out. 5. Basic Flooding: Before we get into designs, let's work on flooding a cookie. Flooding a cookie is basically just piping a border on the outside of the cookie, and then I flood it in with more icing. Right now I'm just cutting off the tip of my piping bag. I'm just going to test on the table to make sure it's the size that I'm going for. That seems a little bit small, so I'm going to come and cut a little bit more and that's more or what I'm going for. Really a lot of this stuff comes down to preference, but personally, that's the size that I like, and to start flooding, I'm just going to touch down, and then as you can see, I'm just hovering over the cookie and I do a little bounce when I meet the corners and I find that gives me a nice corner. I'm letting the icing drop onto the cookie. I'm not dragging my piping bag along the cookie I'm just hovering it right above the cookie and letting the icing drop onto it, that gives me really clean lines because I'm not good at freehand piping. Then I'm just going to fill the whole center of the cookie with icing, so I start just going around the border and then come along the inside. At this stage, you really don't have to worry about all those messy edges because we're going to clean them up. We're just looking to cover the cookie in icing and any area that I can see that I haven't put too much down, I'm just going to go over put a little bit more down, and now I can grab my cookie scribe but you can also use a toothpick for this, and I'm just doing a circular motion. I'm going to start on the border, and I'm just bringing all of the icing into the border and blending those lines together, just like that. This is one of the things that if you have a toothpick, you can just use a toothpick because that's all you're doing is literally to dragging the icing back and forth, the toothpick works perfectly, and then I'm just going to give my cookie a little bit of a shake. You can see this little bump, I do not want that bump, so I'm just going to keep shaking my cookie until it disappears. There we go. So I can see a little air bubble here, they're really hard to see, but once that you know what you're looking for, you can spot them every time. There's a little bump, it's almost like a dark spot, so I'm just going to take the tool and just pick at it and notice the air bubble disappear, and then you can go back over just a little circular motion where you can see it pick up again, give it a little shake and then it's perfectly flooded. Once you have your cookie perfectly flooded, you can notice some imperfections so you can have it drag the icing wherever you want to go, it's very forgiving. So I can see right here this is not a perfectly straight line, so I'm just going to take the tool and drag it out a little bit, right there, just to try to bring that line out. I'm just shaking my tool back and forth to make sure I don't get any of these little bumps that I'm going to create. Have your little shake, and that's pretty clean. Now, I'm going to reset for the next cookie because now we're getting into the fun part. 6. Sectional Flooding: We just learned basic cookie flooding. Now I'm going to show you guys how to do sectional flooding, which is such a cool technique that you can do with so many different designs. Basically, the only difference between sectional flooding and flooding the cookie, is exactly what it sounds like, we're just going to deal with sections. Instead of outlining the entire cookie, I only want to do a section of this cookie. This is a very basic shape but once you get it, you can do so many different designs with it. For this one, I'm just going to make sure that that whole line where it's going to meet the other color is filled. I'm not going to flatten it out yet, I'm going to go right in with my second color, because I want these two colors to blend together. We're practicing the same technique where I'm hovering the bag over the icing and dropping it on, and then filling it in. Kind of like a lot of arts and crafts, once you get those basic few different techniques, everything comes so naturally. Add in little bit extra icing. Now going over this first color first, I'm just going to marble it together. Before moving onto the second color, I'm going to wipe off my scribe, again, you can have a toothpick, just so we don't get that other color all marbled within the white, because you want the two sections to stand on their own, not mixed together. If you want to mix them together, you can for sure do that, but for this look, I just want do a section. I'm going to give that a little shake. Now I can go in and fix any kind of imperfections I can see. I see this icing is coming over this edge which I do not like, so I can come through and just pick it off with my tool, and it'll flow back into its shape, and now we don't have that extra icing sitting there. You can also go back through your line here. My line is calm. I can just pull away this way and I can strain up the line a little bit, and do the same thing here. Each time I do it, I just give the tool a little bit shake and the icing, so we don't see any marks. It all seems very tedious, but the same time, I find it very soothing, very relaxing. I was just getting this perfect edges, and as you got used to it, it'll all go much faster. There you go, now we have got a sectional flooded cookie. You can do this with so many different designs, but right now I'm loving these two different colors. From here I'm going to go and show you guys how to do wet on dry flooding. This cookie is going to take about an hour to dry fully before I can pipe anything on top of it, but luckily, I have one ready to go. 7. Wet on Dry Flooding: This cookie is rock hard, it's been drying overnight, so I'm ready to pipe on top of it. I'm just going to take that same flooding consistency but you can also take the pipeable consistency, which is just the stiff consistency, and I'm just going to pipe a design on top. But the technique itself is piping wet icing on top of dried icing. If this Icing isn't going to blend into the layer that's underneath. It's just going to sit on top almost like it's floating, and then the design is going to stand out a lot. I'm just creating a fun shape on top. I like the look of that, I think it looks really cute. One of the worst common mistakes that I used to make was I would drag my piping tip along the cookie. I would just do this, that way I could use the cookie to stabilize my hand and drag it along. But you can see the clear difference between me starting one point and letting that line drop on compared to dragging it across. You really want to make sure whenever you're doing something that you're just letting that icing flow by itself and drop onto the cookie, and you don't have to worry about shaky hands there just do its own thing. 8. Using Stencils: Stenciling cookies is literally one of my favorite things of cookie art because it's so easy and you can make the cutest designs. You can do it in all different kinds of colors. I just have a few examples of stencils you can use. I found this one in the holiday sections. It's got snowflakes, it's got pumpkins, it's got fall leaves, so you can literally find one stencil for a couple $s, but use it to create themes for so many different cookies. I'm all about those easy life hacks because piping everything can take a long time. But at least this way you can create beautiful, flawless cookies in so many different themes, and then I just have someone that have leaves on them and some lines. I'm going to show you guys how to create this beautiful stencil block on a cookie. Now there's two ways you can really use stencils. One, you can hold it yourself and just rub the icing across it and you have to be very careful not to move it. You're doing a lot of stenciling, you can get one of these which basically just holds the stencil in place. I lay the stencil on top and it holds it with magnets, so I don't really have to worry about anything. I can just worry about the cookie and it drops. Then you put the cookie inside and I'm going to show you guys how to do it both ways. You just close the lid and you can see this stencil sitting right on top of the cookie. When you're stenciling you really need a medium consistency icing, you can't do it with the flooding consistency because it's just going to blur all the lines together. This is like a pipe inconsistency icing. I was going to take a little bit on my spatula and then just go across the whole stencil. I'm going to put on a lot of icing up first to make sure I've covered every little crevice of it and I can see the cookie underneath, so I'm just looking to make sure I've got icing across the whole thing. Then I'm going to scrape off my spatula and then come across and scrape off the stencil. Then once you lift it up, you've got a beautiful look underneath, which I love and you can come through and clean up all those lines. Just using the same cookie scribe or a toothpick, I'm just going to cut through on the edge of the cookie, run it along there, and take off any of that excess icing. I love the look of that, but what I love more is that you can go in so many different directions and do so many different themes of this so easily because I'm all about the time savers. When you're holding a stencil, you need to make sure you're holding it very still. Because if you move a little bit with the stencil, then your image is going to be blurred a little bit wonky, so what I do is I just rest my hand right up against the cookie and hold the stencil and then brush my icing going the other way. I'm going to take that, brush it. I'm trying so hard not to move my hand. I'm trying to keep it as still as I can. We're one-handed. It's a level balancing act, but it still works. Come across it like that and now we have little flowers. The exact same way I'm just going to go through and just clean up those edges. I see it is so forgiving. Since this is already dried, rock hard, I can go through and just wipe it off. I see this like a whole edge here that I've messed up at the edge of the stencil and I don't like it, it looks sloppy on the cookie so I can just scrape that off. I'm just going to take a piece of paper towel and just give it a wipe and that's going to wipe off any of that excess icing that was there, and now we don't have that messy edge. 9. Wet on Wet Flooding: The next technique I want to share with you guys is one of my favorite techniques, which I feel like I keep saying because they're all my favorite techniques. It's also because they're also diverse and you can be so creative with it and create so many different designs. This one is wet-on-wet flooding. It's a little bit more challenging and time sensitive because I need to flood the cookie and then flood more icing to create design within that before the icing starts setting up and drying. So time is a factor with this, but there's a lot of forgiveness, I think with cookies that you can cover up with more icing later. Like if you messed up you can do the dry-on-wet on top of them and pipe some leaves or flowers so you can cover anything up. I'm going to go in with my white because I really want to create this modern floral look. You see I'm just balancing my wrist with my other hand. Sometimes I find that helps if your hand's a little bit shaky. Go through and outline it using the same flooding technique. When you're doing wet-on-wet, it is important that you don't over flood, so you don't want to go too close to the edges and you don't want to put down too much icing. The reason for that is because essentially you're going to be adding a lot more icing into it. Each time you add a little bit more of a design, you're adding more and more icing which is just going to push all of the icing more and more out and you don't want those drippy edges. So less is more at the initial stage. Go through circle, circle, circle motion, blending into the border then blending into the center. Once you've done that, the other thing with doing flooding as you can see if there's little debits in here where there's not as much icing, you can go through a little bit more in to that area and then just give it a little shake. I want that to be perfectly smooth. I basically have a blank canvas to start my cookie art. I'm going to come in with another color. I want to do a big flower. I'm just creating a big blob. That's it. There are no technical term or advanced techniques. I'm creating a blob and you can go with whatever design you're looking for and be really creative with this. Just work very quickly so your icing doesn't dry and you can even create some leaves. As you get used to it, you can have fun and start experimenting. I'm going to create a little vine with a little leaf. I'm doing thicker on the end where it's meeting the branch, and then dragging my piping bag out so it looks like a leaf and this is where you can really get creative and make anything you want. You can tell I like cookies. I'm going to come back. Oh no. I had a thick part in my piping bag because sometimes you can get icing that dries up a little bit. You just squeeze a little bit out, pinch it off and you can carry on. But your icing will start to set up. You may notice that the icing stops laying down as much. You only really have a couple minutes to play, so you have to be mindful when you're doing this of how far you want to go with your designs and not pick anything that's going to be too hard to do in the time-frame. Just creating little leaves everywhere, and then I'm going to go back through, create some more little flower lobes, come through with a different color. I'm very aware that it doesn't look like much now but what my plan is I want to doodle on top of it with an edible marker. I'm going to flatten this out, shake and now this whole surface is a complete flat level surface of icing but has a design within that same level. The thing is, with wet-on-wet detailing you're basically creating a lot of design and colors within one level, one layer of icing but when you do wet-on-dry, you're really just layering and layering up your icings. So you can create one design and layer something on top of it and then layer something on top of that and you're building up the icing. There are so many different things you can do with both techniques, which I'm excited to show you some of my favorite ways to use those techniques in a bit. I noticed this edge went a little bit wonky, I'm going to test it. If I let that dry slightly more, I can push in with my scribe and that's going to strain up that line. What happened here is I just added too much icing so it flowed out and I've like a wonky hexagon, which I'm not a fan of. But you can come through either try to pick it out, which I can see it's crusting, so I want to be really careful because you can see this picks where they're not going to disappear as much. I'm going to try disappear that, but you can just come through and push it in once that's dried a little bit, very delicately. You can see it's not really sticking to my tool anymore and this tool is straight, so it's just going to help strain that line. You don't want to do too much with this because your icing is crusted on top and wet underneath. If you push it too much, you can get wrinkles in your icing. You do the same thing with the other side once it's dry. Now this one that I've done the same design, I have let it dry overnight so I'm ready to start drawing on top of it. 10. Using Edible Markers: The last fundamental technique I'm going to share with you guys is how to add things to your cookies. For this one, I'm going to use an edible block marker. They've worked just the same as any type of pen or a marker except maybe using edible ink like food coloring and then you can draw on top of your cookie. I'm going to do this technique right on top of here just to create a doodle block. This I find fun because I'm not much of an artist. I just like to go wiggly lines and come through, but you can just have fun and be spontaneous and creative with it. I mean, that looks like a cute flower, except I have just doodling. The same thing. I'm overdrawing. This is the look that I like but the nice thing is you can be creative and create wherever look you're going for. I'm just going to do that. Outline some of these. I find this technique looks so cool but as you get into cookie here, you can add lots of different things to your cookies, like sprinkles or core sugar to create some texture, you can even use gold leaf. There's lots of different things that you can add onto your dried cookies. If you're already an artist or illustrator, this is your time to shine. I am not hence the doodling, but that's why I love them, they're so forgiving. Especially if you're into art and you're actually good at art, this is where you can just really show off all of your skills but if you're a beginner or not an artist like me, then you can just have fun and create whatever designs, and it's okay if it's messy. Because once you have all these little messy things together, it creates a beautiful piece of art. Those are all your fundamental skills. Off of those skills, you can basically do any technique. When you start looking at cookies you'll be able to see it's like I can do this design using these different techniques, and that's what we're going to start on next, which is building on the skills to create really cool designs. 11. Decorating Food Cookies: Now that we have the basic techniques down, I'm going to show you guys how to build on those to create really cool designs. All of those techniques you can use in so many different creative ways. The first thing that we're going to do is desserts because of course, I'm a foodie and I already have the first layer done because we know flooding at this point, you guys get this first layer. Let's start with the next layer that we're going to layer up. This is the wet on dry technique. Once this layer has dried, for about an hour, we just want it to not stick to our fingers when we touch it. Now I can start with the next layer. Do a bit of a wave because we're going to do a doughnut. I'm just outlining, just like we did before, except in a wavy pattern, and then in the middle again. You can see how each of the layers is going to create a little bit thicker and a little bit thicker, and this is what I was talking about with layering up icing with the wet and dry technique. Perfect. Now we need to let this layer dry again, but luckily I've got one ready to go. So taking my white icing and both of these icings I'm using right now are just a flooding consistency. This one I'm going to do a drizzle, just coming across. Now you're seeing how I can use even a flooding consistency to pipe with, if it's not an intricate design and we're just creating cute little pattern. I love this one because it's so quick and simple to do, that you don't need a lot of colors, a lot of tools. But that looks really cool and I think it's a good one to practice your techniques on, so you're just layering up the icing and it doesn't have to be perfect because it's just, icing on donuts, just smearing around anyways. We've got the doughnut down so let's move on to the next one which I'm really excited for, because we're going to be using some coarse sugar. This snow cone combines a few different techniques. I've already done the little cone part of the section, and now we're going to do at the top. The difference with this one with the sectional flooding is I've let this dry fully, so it doesn't blend into the top part of it. Now the top three colors, we don't care if they blend because we're going to be covering those up with sugar. Now because this is flooding consistency, I can't add the coarse sugar yet because otherwise it's just going to sink to the bottom of the icing. Let me show you what I'm talking about. If I take the flooding icing, let's just smooth that out a little bit. Now I add the sugar on top of it. Slowly, we're going to see it sink in, especially if I tap off the excess sugar there, you can see it disappearing. We're not really getting that beautiful shine where it's sitting on top of the icing and it really looks like a snow cone, it's just going to keep sinking in and sinking in and sinking in. I timed it and for me it took eight minutes just so that's it's still tacky enough that I can add something to it and I'll stick the icing, but not enough that it's going to sink in. But if you're unsure when you're doing something like this, do this, do a little test run and you can add little bits of sugar until you're getting the look that you're going for, to time it perfectly. That looks dry enough to me, so I'm just going to hold it over my bowl and then sprinkle the sugar right on top. You'll see that this sugar, it looks a lot thicker and coarser than a regular refined sugar is, and I find it adds a really nice texture to the cookie. Tip it over, give it a little tap to get the excess off, and now I'm going to finish it off just with one little stripe of a palpable consistency white just to finish off the cookie and drop that right on to cover up that seam. I love working with sugars and sprinkles and different textures, because I find they just bring everything to life. Now that we have finished the snow cone, let's move on to our final foodie one. The last one we're going to be doing is an ice cream cone. This one combines two really cool techniques. One, we've done which is just the wet on dry flooding, then I'm going to add some detailing for the cone. The other one, I'm using a thick consistency of royal icing to do a piping technique similar to a cupcake, so that we have all this texture going up the ice cream cone. To do that texture, I have three different piping bags here. All of them have a big hole cut in the tip of them. I'm just going to take these three piping bags and stick them in this other piping bag. Give them a shakedown. I'm really looking to make sure they're all at the same height, because I don't want white come through more than the other colors. I want them to all perfectly come through. This technique I have to use four piping bags with royal icing. Usually, I don't like using this many piping bags and this much plastic, I can usually just do other ways of marbling my icing, but with royal icing, it's really important that you don't let it dry out and get crusted, so I want to keep all of the icing in its own separate thing. Then when I'm ready, I can squeeze all of it together, and it's going to create a beautiful swirl. Now let's do that on the cookie. I think I'm going take first, this one is just a flooding consistency, and I'm going to pipe on these other lines. I've already flooded the bottom of the cone, so it has that initial ivory color, that way I'm ready to just pipe this right on top of it. This one's already dried. So I'm going to set this aside and go on the dry one, just so I don't blend any of those colors together. [inaudible] just have fun, be creative with them. I'm just going to do a swirl. It doesn't have to be perfect, we're just coming across, an up, let's see. Going to the movement my icing around a little bit, and then I can come across this way. It's really stiff icing, so it holds that texture so it's a little bit harder to pipe. Let's see, I'm going to come across, and up again. If there's any areas that you're like, that needs a little bit more, you can always just come in. You're not really going to notice. A really good trick is if you put this cookie in front of a fan, it's going to dry faster. That works really well when you're looking to have a lot of texture using a stiff consistency royal icing, because you let this dry over an hour, it's going to lay down a little bit, so you're not going to have all that beautiful standing up texture. That's it for our foodie cookies. I love these ones, I feel like they're really good. Building on your skills cookies for beginners. None of them really use that many technical techniques, it's really easy, but they turn out so cute. The next one we're going to do, it's going to be a wedding theme, but of course, you can apply all those to any celebration. I just chose to do wedding for this one, and we're going to level up the techniques a little bit. 12. Decorating Wedding Cookies: The first thing we're going to do in the wedding theme is going to be a heart. I've already flooded with a dusty rose icing and let that dry. Now we're going to go over with some piping techniques. I showed you guys before how to do floral in a wet on wet design. Now this is how to do floral using a wet on dry design. I'm going to come up, I'm just going to do some hand piping to start off with, and just create a few lines. You can see I touch the cookie at the beginning of the line, come across the whole line, and then when I'm ending it I touch it again to finish it off. Now I'm going to do some piping floral. For a leaf, I'm just going to come across that way and just jot out like this on both ends. Like that. We add one to the end and do the same thing coming across the bottom. This I'm doing all with no piping tip. The majority of what I do, I do with no piping tip because I find that helps the clean up so much. You can do everything with the same size. But the next coloring and a grab does have a piping tip, so we can create more texture. On this bag, I just have a 101 tip, which is a very small pedal tip. With the fat side down towards the cookie, I'm just going to pipe a couple of ruffles. That's going to be at the back of my flower. Then for the front of my flower, I'm just going to do the same thing. Ruffle in front of it. Now I can go through, I'm going to add a little bit of greenery, just to the bottom of the flower so it doesn't look like it ends in nowhere. Then I just have a number 16 tip here that just a really small star, then I can go on and add a couple of little flower buds. I love this because like for one this design is so customizable for any color scheme in an event but it's so simple and it shows you how you can just really like random shape piping but it creates cute little flowers. Let's move on to the next one. Can we just take a moment for this cookie? I am so in love with the design and I'm shocked at how elegant, and fancy, and bougie it looks but how simple it actually was. I was inspired by this stencil that had all of these different heart patterns on it but it had love right here and I thought that would look really cute on a mason jar look. I'm going to lay that right on top of my cookie, trying to center it the best I can by eyeballing it. I'm going to take a stiff consistency of white. Then I've got to try to hold it in place. I'm resting my hand just against the cookie while holding the stencil with my thumb and then I'm just going to come across the stencil. The similar way that we did the handheld stencil in the previous lesson, except the main difference here is we're doing text instead of just a random pattern. We're trying to purposely place this text in a specific spot on the cookie rather than just centering it. Little nerve-wracking, but it turned out really cute. If you mess something up, you can really just wipe it off and start again. Don't be scared. Now that that's done, let's add the floral details. The same way that we did last time, I'm just going to add some string. I thought these would be really cute rustic cookies, I'm going for that burlap look. I'm going to come across, almost like pieces of twine. I can see here where my line broke so I'm just going to come in and just fill that in. Then almost like there is a bore there. I'm just going to do cute couple little squiggly lines coming down. Then for the top of the mason jar, I could do the lid in a different color, but I want to keep everything really clean and white. I'm just going to add some of those lines that you would have seen on a lid in white. Then using the same technique, I can add some cute little florals. Let's start with the greenery. You do have to be careful here because right now I'm piping on top of wet icing. But as long as I'm careful not to bump it, I can just carry on with my design. Of course, if you're making a lot of these ahead of time, then you can just do one stage for liking, 10 cookies and then come back through and do the next one. You're not designing each cookie here, just working systematically. I love that. We're just piping random little blobs here but they look like leaves. If you're doing a lot of piping you might notice that your hand starts getting a bit shaky, so does mine. Don't worry, that's completely normal. You can definitely forgive yourself, If you've done a little bit of a mistake or something you can cover it up. Like if I've got a little line here, I can add a little extra flour or something. Nobody's going to know. The thing is that I noticed whenever I create deserts, like I'll see all of the mistakes I did, but nobody else sees them. Forgive yourself because nobody cares. How cute is that? Come on. Let's move on to the last one in our wedding theme, which I'm going to show you a whole different way to ice the cookie. Now for this one, like technically yes, I could've just flooded it with pure white icing but we've done that. Also I want to do something that looked really different, which is this rusted naked wedding cake block. The way I did that, which is so easy by the way. I just take a little bit of stiff white icing, I just brush it across my cookie using a spatula. I want to make sure I'm covering up a whole cookie first before I start scraping off more icing to create the texture I'm looking for, because I really need it fully covered. Going in all different directions trying to get a full coat. Now that I have that, I can come through and I just want to scrape off a little bit by a little bit. At this point, I'm only going side to side. Because when you ice a cake, that's the direction you'd go in. That's where you'd see the spatula lines. Just going side to side, scraping off a little bit more icing with each pass. You can see it coming together now. Now for naked cakes, you usually see some of that cake fully coming through. I'm going to go even harder and really come through and try to scrape off some. But if I've scraped off a little bit too much, I can just add it back and play around with it until I've got the exact look that I'm going for. I like that look. You can see how you can get carried away with it and just keep going over, and over, and over, and over again. But really that the imperfect is perfect. Now to bring into the same theme of the other ones that you've created, we're going to add on these little floral designs. What I love about this cookie is you do not need to do that first layer and let it dry and come back. This one, you can just do it all in one go. Same little florals, it's going back and forth. I love this for a wedding because this would be perfect for a bridal shower or a wedding favors or anything like that. You can do them with the exact same color scheme or theme around the event. You can take these same techniques and apply them to any celebration. Random piping, then add on. I'm just making sure that my piping bag has been sitting here, then take up any crusted real icing that could be on that tip, clogging it up on me. Usually if I'm not doing the cookie right away, if I'm in-between things, I'll just wrap a piece of dump paper towel around it so it doesn't dry out. Couple more leaves. Its done. Love how these ones turned out. I love that they're all so different, but they match perfectly together. That they all have the theme brought into them, but in a different way with the colors and all the stuff. I really think they're cute. Let's move on to the last theme, which is winter. 13. Decorating Winter Cookies: Winter has to be my favorite season of the year. It's not just because of all the holidays that happen around it, but I am obsessed with the way that the snow looks on trees and the sidewalk, and going for late night winter walks. Of course, this class would not be complete without doing Winter Wonderland themed cookies. This one, I'm going to start with a snowflake, of course, with more of this coarse sugar we'll see a lot of that misty because I feel like it looks like that beautiful Chris kind of sparkly snow. This one we're just going do some piping techniques on top of the cookie. I've already flooded it using a light blue icing. Now I'm going to come across it, and really I'm just creating a lot of lines. Instead of overlapping, overlapping, overlapping each line together, I'm going to start in the center now and come that way, so that way the center doesn't get a big bulge in it from having so many lines overlap together. Touch-up that one and then I can come in and create these little snowflake spikes. I love decorating snowflakes around the holidays because you can make all of them different, but blend in and match together and look really cute. But this is one of my favorite designs because it's simple, but it stands out. As I'm doing different sections of the cookie, I'm just going to rotate it. I'm working relatively quickly here because I don't want my icing to cross too much before I have time to put that sugar on. Goes that way and then I do a few more coming out from the center. Before I do the sugar, I want to add just a silver edible pearl right in the center. Then I can take that and cover it in this sparkly snow. Upside-down, sugar everywhere, tap, tap. If you're smart, you'll do this over a baking tray so it catches all the sugar. It's super sparkly and pretty. Let's move on to the next winter cookie. The next one I'm going is going to be an igloo. Now this technique is a little bit different because I'm going to be using three separate piping tips to do this design. I just have a coupler on my piping bag and that allows me to unscrew the top, take off a tip and interchange it as I'm doing the different techniques. The first one I'm going to start just by piping lines onto my igloo that I've already done sectional flooding onto it and I'm going to pipe some lines for the little snow blocks. Let's make up the igloo just using a number three piping tip. I'm going to come across, and really we're just creating lot lines. To help balance my hand, you can see I'm just holding my wrist up a little bit and resting my elbow on the table that's going to balance this hand which is going to balance this hand. Come cross, and just like you make bricks, we're just going to stagger the joints of the blocks here. Coming through and each time staggering them. Base Q of the design is this is going to turn up being, is really just piping lines. Now I'm going to switch up my piping tip and put on a number 12, which is just a large, round piping tip. A lot of the different numbers I'm saying it's just referencing the number of tip you're using so it references the different been or the shape. This one, it just has a larger opening like that, so that way we can create the front of the igloo. We come around this way, and then with my scribe I can even come down, and just straighten up that line a little bit, almost like it meets the bottom. Now this you're going to have to let dry fully before you move onto the next one. But this one is fully dry. I'm going to switch over to number 10, which is just the next size down from 12, so you just want a little bit smaller. I can create some snow, some fresh fallen snow coming down around the entrance of my igloo and around the top. Of course, come back in with that coarse sugar, and add it on top. Tap, tap, tap. I love this one, I feel like it looks really cute, and of course you can see where you can stop here. But the more little details that you add on, even though this took like no time at all, it looks really cute. I feel it helps bring it together. This last design has to be one of my favorite cookies of the entire class because I love this technique. I love how cool it looks, but yet it's so easy, everything is so easy because I'm trying to show you guys how you can take these little techniques and really save time by not doing intricate stuff, but still make it look intricate without the work. I'm going to start off by flooding this one. Now this one, just like the flora one we did earlier, is going to be a wet-on-wet design. Time is important because you don't want it to dry. This one, I'm just going to outline it and then flood it. As you get into more intricate shapes, they do take a little bit more time to flood them because you need to go around each of these edges. You're trying not to distort the shape too much. You're trying to follow that the best that you can. I'm going to flood in the center. I'm just going to show you, you can see how much icing is in this bag, but I'm not holding it up here. Look how shake I am in trying to pipe it like that. As soon as you hold it more down, look at the control I have. It's all about how you hold the back. Let's get this all smooth so we can move on to doing the really cool design. Shake up, perfect. I love this design so much. I'm just going to come through and surprise, surprise, we're just piping lines. I'm going to go with this color and come through. I'm just alternating between my two different shades of blue. The light blue, I just used a sky blue gel based food coloring and the dark one, I used a royal blue. I'm going to skip a couple of lines and come up here and do the tip. I'm doing that for a couple of reasons. One, it's going to be a little bit harder for me to do the pattern across the finger, and the other, I think it looks really cute to have a section. It's still busy, but it's not overly busy. But you're creating a pattern within a pattern. We are still trying to work very quickly, hoping that that bottom layer has not begun to crust yet. I'm going to come through and just drag those lines together, wiping off the scribe, and then drag back the other direction. Each time I'm going to wipe it off, so I'm starting with a clean line. Look how cute that is. Quickly, shake. Don't shake into the other cookies. I'm noticing that this line in the middle isn't quite joining. I'm just going to carefully, you can see that it's all white there, I'm going to add a little bit in just to encourage it to come together. Perfect. I can see that because we've added so much icing in, I've come off this edge a little bit, but I can just take my scribe, come around, and while the icing is still wet we're just going to scrape off that excess. This will just dry like that and look completely seamless. Now this layer will need to dry for a full hour before you can do the next section. But this one's already dry and ready to go. I'm going to go in with a piping inconsistency of white icing and come across the top of the mitten and just fill that in. Even with the piping consistency, you can still come through and smooth it out a little bit. It just takes longer to flood, that's the main difference. Add the coarse sugar right on top. I love this pattern. I love the blues together, I love the sugar, I feel like everything with it really works. I love how different each one of these cookies look, but as well as how different the themes are. But still just using the fundamental techniques that we learned earlier and you can really see how you can take your creativity and have endless results. 14. Final Thoughts: We've made it [inaudible] class. We went through so many different techniques, and different cookie designs. I hope you guys learned a lot and had fun. Have fun being creative and trying them out yourself, and when you do, share your work in the project gallery down below. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I will see you guys again next time.