Blog - Cookies made in Melbourne

Diamond Wedding Cookies

August 10, 2017

Diamonds are a girls’ best friend as they say, and if you were to give out diamonds to your guests as wedding favors then I’m sure you will gain a whole bunch of new best friends, but who are you?

Richie Rich?!

Are you making it rain with diamonds?! I should think NOT!

But here is the next best thing.

Diamond Cookies and if you have the time soon to be bride or grooms to make them yourself for your guests then here is our tutorial to show you how.

First, find a trusty recipe to make the base of the cookie. Either source a cookie cutter in the shape of a diamond or hand cut them.

In this situation we were making about a dozen so hand cutting them is easy enough. But if you need to make over a hundred I suggest sourcing a cutter for your own sanity. However, if this is for a small batch then get yourself on Google image, type in “Diamond Silhouette” and ta-da, a breath of diamond shapes to choose from!

Print it out and take a piece of baking paper and trace over it, cut it out and you’ve got your stencil.

Now onto the fun part, the actually decorating of the cookie.

Instructions

Using a Wilton 2 nozzle and thick icing outline the diamond shaped cookie.
Then flood the cookie , leave that cookie for a few hours to completely dry (in colder weather you might need to leave this overnight to make it dries completely).
Next comes the detailing which might require a few practice goes if you don’t feel too confident, especially with piping straight lines. Use the thick icing again as you did for the outline and create a border of the cookie shape, then add your diamond detail.
Leave that to dry for few hours and there you go! You are done, package them as you wish and delight your guests with this edible gift.

Full Video Tutorial

Oktoberfest Hearts – Gingerbread Cookie Hearts (Lebkuchen)

July 6, 2017

So what do two Asian girls living in Melbourne know about traditional Oktoberfest Heart Shaped Cookies called Lebkuchen?

Well honestly nothing much.

We know so little about it, that we haven’t even been to the Oktoberfest festival in Munich to see what it’s like yet (although we have been to Munich, so maybe that gives us a smidge of street credit…I hope). But as we make gingerbread biscuits and we have a heart shaped cookie cutter and we’re based in Australia we’ve gotten plenty of orders for these Lebkuchen which mean’s we’ve had to study these little beauties and try to replicate them to the best of our abilities (which is more Kawaii then German…).

These German cookies definitely require a certain unique technique to make them exactly like the Oktoberest style love hearts. However we’ve improvised and came up with our own interpretations of it and we’re going to show you how, in case you were interested on making some this October!

Firstly let’s start with the basics; make or find a heart shaped cookie. Try to find a standard cookie size of about 8.5cm across in diameter or larger, any smaller than that and it might be hard to fit any sort of decorative flair in the middle once that elaborate border has taken up most of the surface area.

Depending on the type of cookie you have made, we sometimes like to flood the whole cookie with brown thin icing. This makes the border and writing stick a bit more firmly to the cookies. We have done them without flooding the cookie too and most of the time its fine, occasionally though we found the border does break off, especially on humid days. But if you live in a dry area, not a problem and just skip this step.

Our heart here is shaped about 11cm across in diameter so we’re using a large circle piping nozzle (Wilton 5, for a standard cookie a Wilton 3 will work fine).

Starting from the middle of the heart start moving the piping bottle in an upwards and downward motion with your hands while moving your hand along the outer edges of the heart.

TIP: You don’t have to do this border in one go, you can pause, turn the cookie so your hands are not forced to be in an uncomfortable position.

You can stop right here with the border and leave it as a single layer. But in this case we wanted to add an extra colour so with a slightly thinner nozzle (Wilton 3 or Wilton 2 for a smaller heart) I go around the edge of the heart again in the same up and down motion with the hand.

Leave that to the side and let the border dry for a few hours (longer waiting time in colder weather) so when you get ready to do the middle you don’t accidently smug the border with your hands.. but we’re professionals (*cough*) and we’re going to go straight into it!

Watch the video below for the full tutorial and to see how we decorate the middle, but you can go off the path and do it anyway you like because there are no rules.

However for some ideas have a look at what we’ve created before or try to use some of these common phrases that seem to appear on these traditional biscuits.

Prost = Cheers

Ich liebe dich = I love you

Held = Hero

Mein Traumprinz – Prince Charming

Weil I Di mog = Because I like you

Ich bin Single = I am single (for all our single ladies out there, hola!)

Es ist Aus = It is over (dumped by a cookie… better than a post-it (SATC reference) right audience)

Whatever message and decorations you choose have fun with it, and if it all goes to shizz just eat it and hid the evidence.. that’s what we do.

Oktoberfest Gingerbread Cookie video tutorial

Happy decorating GC Peeps!

XOXO

Janet & Michelle

How to decorate a Minion Face Tutorial

September 30, 2015

I think it’s safe to say that everyone is a fan of Minions, they are just so cute and now you can create them in your very own kitchen!

This is such a simple but effective tutorial, it won’t take long at all and it’s really cute.

Here’s what you will need for this tutorial:

Mini Circle Cookie Cutter
Wilton Set of 8 Icing Colors (yellow, white, grey and black)
Black sugar pen
Piping consistency royal icing
Flooding consistency royal icing
Decorating nozzles tip 2 –Tala Original Icing Tubes – No.2 Writer Medium Piping Nozzle.
Skewer or chopstick (to spread the flood icing)

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Different Types of Food Dyes

September 16, 2015

The truth is you don’t have to use colors when decorating cookies but it’s such a great way to show style and personality in your cookie designs. It makes them eye-catching and really stands out and if you are decorating well known characters, colors play a big part in identifying who they are.

Now there are few different types of food coloring that you can invest in, we use majority of them because there are pros and cons for each type which we will briefly go through.

Liquid Food Dyes

So these are the water based dyes that you can typically buy from most grocery stores. They are less intense which means you can continue adding until you get the desired color tone that you want, really great for light pastel hues and normally they are inexpensive.

However because they are water based they will change the consistency of your icing, it will make it thinner, so if you need thicker 10 second or 20 second icing, best not to use these types of dyes unless the color is extremely light and you only 1 or 2 drops of the liquid food dye.

Liquid Gel Food Dyes

These are thick gel-type liquids that have this texture because of the glycerine and corn syrup base. Compared to the water based dyes these colors are more concentrated, which means you only need a small amount to make darker and vivid colors. Since you don’t have to use as much, the liquid gel will last longer and it doesn’t change your icing consistency as much.

Unfortunately these are really hard to find in your local stores, especially if you want a variety of colors, so we have to buy most of them online.

Gel Paste Food Dye

This is a thicker and way more concentrated version of the liquid gel colors. It’s extremely thick almost like glue or paste and it’s best to use just a very small amount unless you want the icing color to be very dark. The best ways to add these dyes to your icing is by using a toothpick.

These will last you a very long time because you use so little of it, but not easy to find at the grocery stores so will have to go online again for these ones and they can also get a little bit messy, if you’re not careful.

Powdered Food Dye

We’ve actually never used this type of dye before but it is pretty much a food dye in powder form. I guess one of the good things about this would be that it doesn’t change the consistency of your icing because there is no liquid in it to do so.

I’ve never seen powdered food dyes at the store so I assume that it would be a specialty product that you would have to search for online.

Natural Food Coloring Dyes

This is another one that we have never used before but it is a food coloring that is made from plants and natural sources instead of synthetic ones.

These ones are great for those who suffer from allergies, they are a healthier food coloring option, but because they are naturally they tend to be a bit more expensive and they cant really produce the vibrant colors that you see with the other food dyes.

You can learn more about mixing food colors and where to get all the different types with our new online class – Learn Cookie Decorating Basics in 10 days with Royal Icing.

Top 3 Essential Tools for Cookie Decorating

September 2, 2015

Decorating cookies at home is a lot easier than it looks.

However there are a few essential tools that you require in order to produce the best results. Luckily these tools are not expensive and they can easily be found in your local department stores such as Kmart or Target as well as online stores such as Amazon and Ebay.

There are a few items needed but today we will go through the top 3 must-have tools for cookie decorating:

1. Piping bags or bottles

This would be classified as one of the most important tools if you are decorating cookies with royal icing, we use it for piping, flooding and drawing on the details. Personally we prefer the bottles over the bags just because we find them easier to hold and use but you may find the bags to be a better match for your decorating, so whichever one works for you is the one you should get.

We have bought most of our piping bottles from an online store called Karen’s Cookies

2. Decorating Nozzle Tips

These pretty much go hand in hand with the piping bags and bottles, without them it’s going to be a bit difficult to decorate cookies. Typically when you start off you would only need 3 different types of nozzles:

No. 2 Round decorating tip which we use for all our outline work and majority of the time the details as well.
No. 12 Round decorating tip which is used for flooding a cookie because it has a much bigger tip and allows the icing to flow out easier.
No. 1 Round decorating tip is great for piping on very fine details and also for writing because it has a very small tip.

Decorating nozzles can easily be found on Amazon, there is quite a vast variety, but we would say that Wilton typically have the best ones.

3. Food Coloring

If you are going to be decorating with icing then you will need a range of food dyes to mix all those beautiful colors together so that your cookies will have that burst of color that instantly makes them stand out. Also it helps if you have a lot of detail on the cookie to distinguish what each thing is that you have piped on.

If you don’t want to invest too much money in food colors at the beginning then we would recommend you just get the 3 primary colors; red, blue and yellow and that way you can mix them to make other colors such as green and purple. It would also help if you had black to darken the colors and white to give them a lighter (almost pastel) look.

Again, the best place to purchase food coloring is either Amazon or Karen’s Cookies.

So those are are top 3 essential tools for cookie decorating, if you would like to know what other items are needed then we have a FREE guide to give you when you sign up to our newsletter below.