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How to Decorate an Elephant Cookie Tutorial

June 11, 2015

This is such a fun and quick tutorial that you can do yourself over and over again.

There are very few steps involved so it won’t take up too much of your time. It does involve a heart stencil for the elephant’s ear but you can make the stencil out of paper and then throw it away once you have used it.

Here’s what you will need for this tutorial:

Elephant Cookie Cutter
Heart- shape stencil
Wilton Set of 8 Icing Colors (we used blue and green but you can choose any color you like for your elephant)
Piping consistency royal icing
Flooding consistency royal icing
Edible Pen – We use these FooDoodler Food Coloring Markers – 10 Colors – Kosher (1, A)
Decorating nozzles tip 2 –Tala Original Icing Tubes – No.2 Writer Medium Piping Nozzle.
Skewer or chopstick (to spread the flood icing)

Icing Consistency

June 6, 2015

We have been asked a number of times by our customers at the local markets about how our royal icing stays on the cookie and doesn’t run off. Well the answer is in the consistency of the icing and less about the ingredients which is a standard royal icing ingredients that you can get from anywhere.

Here is a simple royal icing recipe you could use.

TIP: Add the water gradually, it is better to have a thicker royal icing mix to begin with because it will be easier to change the consistency by adding more water later.

There are basically 3 different consistency of royal icing we use for outlining, flooding and intricate detailing known as the twenty second icing as name by one of our favorite cookie decorators Sweet Sugarbelle which can be found here.

Once you have chosen your royal icing recipe that doesn’t need to be adjusted in order to start decorating cookies, instead you need to adjust the consistency (in other words the thickness) of the icing to do different things.

Normally, you begin by using piping icing to outline the cookie. This creates a border to make sure the icing does not flow over the edges. The consistency of the outlining icing could be described as toothpaste, if you are using an icing bottle and you hold the bottle upside down the icing will start coming down but at a very slow pace. Another way to test the consistency of the icing is while the icing is in a mixing bowl run a spoon through the middle of the icing it should take about 10 seconds for the line to disappear.

Outline Icing

After the cookie is outlined, a thinner version of the same icing is used to fill the outlined area. This is called FLOOD icing. We usually fill the middle of the cookie and to cover it to the edge we use a chopstick to cover the edges so it doesn’t overflow. The flooding icing should flow a bit like shampoo and if you run a spoon through the middle of the icing it should take about 5 seconds for the line to disappear.

Flood Icing

Finally to add intricate details to your cookie such as writing names, making drop flowers, features on faces or basically anything that requires the icing to be firm and stay in place we use the 20-second icing consistency which is the thickest out of all the consistency and if you run a spoon through the middle of the icing it should take about 20 seconds for the line to disappear and it requires the most pressure to pipe the icing out of the bottle/bag.

20 Second Icing

Mastering consistency is the single most important cookie making skill. Once you have mastered this skill through a bit of trial and error you should be able to achieve most effects on your cookie decorating adventure.

Just a few more tips before I go:

Use another squeeze bottle with a small nozzle to add more water to your icing, you don’t want to overdo it and make it too runny, however if you do add too much water don’t panic make sure you have some spare icing sugar and add a few teaspoons of it in to thicken it up again.
Play around with the consistency, depending on the temperature in the air sometimes you need thicker or thinner consistency and what works for us, maybe not work as well for you.

Feel free to add any tips you might have, or ask questions.

The Beginning

June 3, 2015

After 4 years of working on Gingerbread Corner, it really is nice to look back at when we first started because you never realize how far you have come until you look back.

So for those who are not aware, my sister and I had been trying different types of businesses beforehand. We tried to sell handmade jewelry, Pashmina scarves, also selling second hand items on Ebay but none of them lasted very long.

Then one of my sister’s friends was getting married and she was trying to look for wedding bombonieres and she saw a picture on the internet of gingerbread people with the names of each wedding guest written across their stomachs and so she decided that she really wanted gingerbread at her wedding.

That’s when my sister and I decided why don’t we try it and also turn it into a business!

So in August 2010, we made our very first batch of gingerbread cookies as a test to see how they would turn out. I remember keeping the raw batch too long in the fridge that when we took it out to roll, it was just so tough and we were breaking out into a sweat. We also only had one rolling pin so we had to take turns with rolling the dough, which was kind of a good idea because the person rolling got so tired from the hard cookie dough!

As you will see from the photos below these were the results from our very first ever cookie batch that we made…I’m very happy to say that we have definitely improved. But looking at these pictures, makes me smile and feel great that we are still continuing on with Gingerbread Corner and I honestly believe that it will not end anytime soon.

3 Things I have Learnt from Starting a Cookie Business

May 20, 2015

My sister and I started Gingerbread Corner 4 years ago and through the years it definitely has taught us a lot of lessons which I am grateful for and hope to learn some more as we continue on this journey.

Here are the top 3 things that I have learnt from starting a cookie business.

1. Set realistic expectations

Okay, so when we had our very first market booked in, we were super excited and like most people we thought our product was pretty awesome. So we thought that we were going to be so popular that we would sell out at the market. We worked endlessly making over 200 bags of cookies just for that one particular market, we were very eager. But boy did we have a rude awakening when it was market day.

Firstly this was our very first market ever, so no one knew about Gingerbread Corner yet or what our cookies looked like or tasted like so we couldn’t draw in much of a crowd.

Secondly just because a market is on it doesn’t mean that there will be traffic and even if there is, it doesn’t mean that they will stop by your stall and buy your product.

Thirdly, because we were so focused on making the cookies, we didn’t think much about our stall setup and how our table would look like. So we ended up just laying all the cookies down on the table on one level, which didn’t look that appealing or attractive.

After that first market, we definitely made some changes.

2. Just because you like it, doesn’t mean others will

There have been a lot of cookie designs where we thought they were really nice and pretty and therefore they would definitely be a hit with our audience…but we were wrong on many occasions.

Everyone’s style does differ and you must pay attention to what your customers like and want. We found that our customers liked designs of characters that they could recognize, which is very understandable, so we try to decorate our cookies with more popular characters on them and have stopped doing the designs where no one really responded to them even though we quite liked them ourselves, but your customer does always come first.

3. As time goes on you will get better at your Craft

There is a great photo of our very first batch of cookies that we ever made which I love looking at because it makes me realize that we really have improved…a lot (the designs were pretty awful)!!

That’s the thing I love most about starting something new and that goes for most things in life, if you keep at it and practicing you do get better. I think that a lot of times we tend to give up before we have really given it a good try because it was hard or we feel like we are just not getting it.

But if you really love doing something, keep going and see where it can take you because I can guarantee that you will eventually master your craft and open up new doors for yourself.

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You have to start somewhere…

May 13, 2015

I was looking through our photo album of past cookie designs and I thought “What a long way we have come?” This is what I love about start-ups and businesses, the journey and the fact that as time goes on and you keep going, you do improve.

So I just wanted to share a few of our earlier design photos and hopefully you will agree that we have gotten better as the years have gone by hahaha

Gingerbread girl – we don’t really use this cutter as much anymore, we tend to use the cutter of the gingerbread people that have a slight bite taken out of their head because we think it’s much cuter.

We tried to do a fashion/style design range for all the fashion lovers out there, but they never made it as popular as some of our other designs.

I do believe this is our very first gingerbread boy design. From memory I think we got the idea from these trendy cookies we may have seen from New York where they had no faces, so we thought we would do our own version.

Oh wow! Look at these! Looking at them, I’m not a fan but they were our very first Christmas designs and you can see that the icing doesn’t look as great because it was only icing sugar and water. we didn’t want to use raw egg white in it and we hadn’t pavlova powder yet, so on these cookies the icing looks quite watery and you can see through to the cookie and the details are quite sloppy. But I still look at them with very fond memories because without them, we wouldn’t be here today.

I hope you guys have enjoyed the look back, we have many more of these that I will share with you in another post.

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Favorite Mother’s Day Gift Boxes

May 4, 2015

With Mother’s day just around the corner for Australia, we just wanted to share some of our favorite gift boxes that we have put together over the years to celebrate this amazing day.

If you would like to make an inquiry, please email us at [email protected]

Simple Photo Editing

April 5, 2015

Since our customers rely heavily on what our gingerbread cookie designs look like, photos of our product is a very important part of the business. But these days you cannot just use a raw image, in order to make it more appealing to customers, a bit of photo editing is required.

Now I never go overboard with the photo editing because I believe the idea of it, is just to bring out the best aspects of a photo. It is not to completely change the product into something that it is not (ie the controversial photo shopping of cover models).

My favorite photo editor to use is Pixlr, it is a free online photo editor which is simple to use and it gives you the option of using the advanced editor or a easier express version.

For photos on the website I never like to use a filter, I prefer the “white light” look. Whereas for photos on social media such as Instagram, I say go crazy with the filters.

So there are only a few things I like to adjust on each photo using Pixlr Editor:

– Blur the background so that your product is the only thing in focus

– Increase the brightness

– Increase the contrast

– Increase the color vibrance

– Increase the saturation

The levels of adjustment depend on the quality of the original photo taken. For Gingerbread Corner as long as there is good lighting in the original photo, then I can work with it.

My sister and I are not professional photographers or editors we only know the pure basics, which works for our business. So our suggestion to you when it comes to photo editing, is to play around with it and have a look at other businesses and their photo standards to compare and replicate.

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