On a cross-country hunt I sought out a professional cookie decorator to share
her secrets on how to create these gorgeous little works of art!
Hi my name is Jossie Lukasik and I own Sweet Spot here in Charlotte, North
Carolina. i spent an evening with Jossie learning
the tricks of her trade which I'm now going to share with you!
I'll start with the step-by-step process for decorating cookies,
including Chef Jossie's three tricks for perfect piping,
and then show you how to use cookies to decorate a cake.
I'll finish with my attempts at cookie decorating and some bloopers.
To decorate cookies you'll need cookies of course
and royal icing, which you can buy or make yourself. When you're not using the
royal icing, cover it with a damp towel to stop it
from drying out. Tint small amounts with gel colours to
use in piping bags next and you'll need a stiff and loose
consistency of each colour for different parts of the cookies.
Start by outlining each colour of your design using the piping bag with the
thicker consistency of that colour of royal icing.
There are three tricks for outlining your cookies. The first two
go together and they're speed and pressure. When you find the right combination
of the speed you move your piping bag and the pressure you squeeze your bag
with, you'll pipe a perfectly straight line. The
bigger the hole you cut in your piping bag,
the faster you'll have to move the bag and the less pressure you'll need to
apply compared to if you cut a small hole and
then you'll need less pressure and can move the bag more slowly.
So for the most control as you pipe, a small hole is easiest.
If you move your bag too slowly or apply too much pressure to the bag
the icing will wiggle as you pipe and your line will be more of a zigzag.
If you move your bag too fast or don't apply enough pressure to the bag
the icing won't be able to keep up with you and your line will break.
The third trick is the height that you hold the piping bag above the cookie.
When you're first learning it feels natural to hold the bag just above the
cookie and you'd imagine that your piping would
be best when you're close to the target but actually you have the most control
when your piping bag is higher up and when you're directing the royal
icing from a bit of distance you'll get much neater, more accurate lines.
None of this matters if the consistency of your royal icing is too thin or too
thick. If it's too thick your line will break
as you're piping and you'll leave visible texture in your lines.
If it's too thin it will spread out as you pipe so your line won't be as sharp
and any angles or curves will bleed into each other and might even slide off the
side of the cookie. When you're outlining your cookies you
need to outline every coloured section so for this cookie there's the beige
colored ice cream cone, this first layer of white ice cream and
then some pink ice cream and then more white on top. These little
cookie turntables are amazing by the way but they're definitely not essential. You
can decorate on any flat surface, it's just convenient being able to spin
the cookie around like this. Immediately after outlining all of the
coloured sections of the cookie it's time to flood them.
Flooding is just filling in an outline with royal icing of a looser consistency
so as you squeeze it out of the piping bag it spreads out to cover the cookie
all the way up to the outline. You can use a pin like this called a
cookie scribe to push the icing all the way to the outline
and also to pop any air bubbles in the icing.
See below for the links to the products used in this video
and to sign up to Sweet Spot Studio's online cookie decorating classes.
For sections of colour next to each other you can either flood them straight after
each other or you can wait for the first section to
dry before you flood the next section. If you flood coloured sections
next to each other so different colours of wet royal icing are touching each
other, the colours will blur together where
they meet instead of having a clear-cut line.
That might be the effect you want like for this popsicle, where the colors don't
have a distinct division between them. It's kind of blurry because the pink and
white and blue royal icing touched each other while it was still wet
so the join is fluid. The other option is to flood areas that aren't touching each
other and then let those dry before continuing.
Royal icing takes several hours on its own to dry but you can speed up the
process by putting the cookies in front of a fan
or they'll dry even faster in a dehydrator.
For this ice cream cookie the pink was flooded first
and then dried in a dehydrator for about five minutes so when the white icing
floods this section it goes right up to the edge of the pink
icing but because the pink icing is dry and hard,
the join between them is clear and solid so the pink and white are separate
sections of colour with distinct boundaries.
Compare this to the pink and white and blue icing sections that were piped side
by side without drying in between. After drying the first round of flooding
there are several techniques you can use for the next round of icing.
You can use royal icing with a thin consistency to flood more areas,
filling in other colour sections like the stick on this popsicle.
By drying the rest of the icing first, the division between the stick
and the popsicle will be more distinct than if you'd piped the stick right next
to the blue icing while it was still wet. Now that the sections you flooded first
have dried and hardened, you can add detail lines like making the
waffle texture on this cone and the piping will sit on top of the
layer of icing that's dry. You'll need a stiff consistency of icing
for this, the same stiffness as you used to outline.
If you had piped these details on before letting the first layer dry,
the details would sink into the wet base layer of icing.
A fun technique with stiff consistency icing is to add texture.
These squiggly circles are holding their shape after being piped and this
consistency is the same as for outlining shapes.
If you used thinner icing like you used for flooding the shapes,
the icing would sink down and spread out and lose its texture.
This texture is great for the rough part at the bottom of a scoop of ice cream
and to make it look less neat you can smudge the lines by scratching them with
a cookie scribe. The same technique works well for the
texture at the top of an ice cream cone, using zigzag lines instead of circular
loops. Create shapes on top of other shapes by
outlining another section of colour over one of the first sections of colour
and then filling it in. This is going to look like chocolate syrup on top of the
pink ice cream. This icing is a combination of the
stiffer icing used for outlining and the thinner icing used for flooding
so the consistency is somewhere in the middle and it works for outlining the
syrup and also for flooding it. By piping this
on top of another colour which has already dried,
you're adding thickness to the icing which adds dimension and it really looks
like syrup poured on top of the ice cream.
You can do this with all sorts of shapes like these little lines for sprinkles.
If you piped these onto wet icing they would sink into the icing
instead of sitting on top of it. You can use icing as glue to attach sprinkles to
your cookies. After an area of icing has dried, pipe a
little dot of icing with a stiff consistency
and then press a sprinkle into it. As the dot of icing dries it will secure the
sprinkle in place. You could press the sprinkle into the
base layer of icing on the cookie while it's still wet
so that the sprinkle sticks onto it and you wouldn't need to add the dot of
icing as glue but the pressure you use as you push the
sprinkle in can make the layer of icing bulge.
By doing it this way, with a dot of icing as glue, you have more control because
you can adjust the sprinkle after pressing it into the dot,
shifting it a bit lower or higher before the dot dries and sets the sprinkle in
place. When you finish decorating your cookies,
place them in front of a fan to dry completely.
The time it takes depends on the humidity but it's usually several hours.
Now i'll show you a way to use cookies to decorate a cake!
While our cookies are drying I'm going to make the most of being in such a
beautiful studio kitchen. With this gorgeous mixer I'm making a
batch of my 4 Minute Buttercream frosting and i've put the link for that
recipe and tutorial in the video description.
I'm going to place cookies around the sides of the cake after frosting it.
To do this, assemble your cake and apply a crumb coat, which is a thin layer of
frosting to trap in any crumbs that might come off the cake
so that they don't get into the final coat of frosting. For my final coat i'm
going to put sprinkles in the frosting and after perusing the extensive
sprinkle collection in the studio, I'm choosing these simple pink and blue
jimmies which i'm pouring into the buttercream and then spreading onto the
cake. You can press cookies straight into the
frosting while it's still soft and sticky
but that can make the frosting bulge around the sides of the cookies.
Alternatively you can chill the frosting to let it set
and then use a little bit of plain buttercream to attach the cookies.
That's what I'm going to do. You can do this by spreading a bit of buttercream
onto the back of a cookie and then pressing it against the frosting
and that little bit of buttercream will set and secure the cookie against the
side of the cake. Or you can put the buttercream in a
piping bag and pipe it onto the back of the cookie before pressing it onto the
frosting. Chef Jossie gave me some piping bags of
royal icing to take home with me like you'd get if you got a subscription
to her Sweet Spot online cookie decorating classes.
The colours separated in the bags like she told me they would
but you can squeeze and massage them for a while to get them back to normal.
I had bags of thinner and thicker consistency for the different styles of
piping and some cute little cookies ready to be
decorated. I'd love to tell you that my first
attempt at cookies ended up being just as beautiful as hers
but I quickly gave up and gazed out at the pretty view instead!
I think I'll stick to cakes for the moment. Thanks for watching!
I'll be sharing my bloopers in a moment. Comment below to tell me what cake
decorating skill or technique you'd like to learn
and subscribe to my YouTube channel for a new cake decorating tutorial every
week! And here is our beautiful (bluh!)
I always turn into an American accent when i'm talking to someone with an
American accent and then I remember I'm supposed to be British!
And here's our beautiful, festive... Festive? Refreshing?
Oh! Refreshing!
We are doing a lot these days and you can find out more information at www.sweetspotstudioclt.com