Wednesday 21 August 2013

Where I extol the virtues of a dehydrator

I've had a chance lately to create a couple of sets of my own designs, both ordered by my mother for friends, and she is happy to leave the whole thing up to me. So nice to have a break from characters and logos!


For the first I bought an Orla Kiely gift box, and used the same colours to create a simple but striking set of flowers and leaves to fill the box with.


I loved the restricted colour palate and simple designs, just adding a bit of detail and movement with the lines and dots on the petals. There's something very satisfying about piping curvy, organic lines like this.


For the latest set, I turned to a greetings card I've had hanging around for a while, with abstract seedheads and plants on it, and used it as the inspiration for a very abstract set of cookies, for an anniversary gift.


I used a mixture of wet on wet flooding, piped details, and some lovely large blobs for flowerheads, that I would never have dared to try before The Beast came to live with us: my 6 tray dehydrator. It sits, ugly, dark and huge on my desk, but performs its duties marvelously. It dries the icing quickly enough to prevent cratering, an annoying habit of the icing to collapse in on itself on blobs and small areas of icing.

Cratering occurs because of the speed that moisture is wicked away from below the surface, in small areas (increased surface area to volume ratio the smaller something is - remember that from school? Or is it decreased - clearly I've forgotten). The surface is weakened before it has a chance to crust over and harden properly. The dehydrator causes a hard crust to form quickly enough to counteract the process.

You can see cratering in several spots in this old photo of a cookie (Alice, from an Alice in Wonderland set, who I based on the Winter Girls from Klickitat Street).


You can see where I've tried to patch up the sleeves, and added an extra 'blob' to one pigtail, and also where I've just left a crater in the hair tie on the left.


But no more. I can do blobs galore. And also add dark colours to light, as the surface dries fast enough in the dehydrator to prevent bleeding and blurring. It's also a good place to store the cookies in overnight as they're drying out, to keep them safe and stop all the tables in the house being covered with trays.


I found a nice set of natural coloured tart boxes that are perfect for boxing cookies to be hand delivered. So these are now waiting to be taken to their new home this weekend.




28 comments:

  1. Beautiful work, again! I am constantly amazed at your creations. Truly inspiring!

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  2. So wonderful and elegant cookies!!!Congratulations!

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  3. I love the modern designs on your cookies, you are very talented

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  4. Hi I just found your blog via your appearance on Julia Usher ' s Cookie Connection. Thanks for the informative article about avoiding cratering. Fantastic designs!

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  5. Hi there, I've just discovered your blog via cookie connection as well and am so chuffed to have found a UK based blog. Spent way too much time enjoying looking at all your gorgeous cookies! One quick question - I'm wanting to purchase a dehydrator and am wondering which one you use? With so many to choose from, it's difficult to tell from the descriptions and reviews which are good for cookies! Thanks so much

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    Replies
    1. Katy, I wrote a long reply on my ipad this morning and it's disappeared! Summary: my original was an unbranded one from an ebay company, with drawers. Worked fine, but the drawers were a little distorted (not a problem if you want it for its proper function!) which meant I couldn't put freshly flooded cookies in certain areas in case they overflowed!

      Then it broke, but I got a full refund and put it towards a small Excalibur model. It wasn't cheap, but it does have nice rigid shelves that you can decorate directly on then slide into the machine. It's fairly quiet too, sort of!

      My best advice would be to ensure you can alter the temperature to really low or off, to avoid heating up the cookies and softening the fat (so that it blotches the icing), and to get one with drawers so you can put individual cookies in and out easily as you work on them, rather than pull apart a whole stack of trays to get at ones on the bottom!

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