Nature, not naturist. Let's get that out of the way to start with.
These cookies were made for someone who is heading off to Orkney for their annual nature festival, and I was directed to this website for inspiration.
This was fun as I got to use a mixture of techniques: brush embroidery; painting; and water splashes using thick flood icing in white, a technique that I've found useful in the past for my lifeboat and motorbike cookies.
This little seal wasn't paying attention and nearly got washed off his rock.
Here is a crab.
Anyway, I made this little video for you. It's a bit speedy, it won't take long to watch.
Don't forget to keep an eye out for more 'What's New, Honeycat?' blog posts at Cookie Connection and to see the rest of my videos click on the little youtube button at the top right!
Update: proof these cookies do get eaten; here's a photo of the whale fluke and nature festival plaque cookies about to be munched in Orkney!
At lunchtime on the 13th February, I was browsing Valentine's Day cards in a half-hearted attempt to find something for my husband. But when it comes to words of romance I tend towards the sarcastic end of the spectrum. I'm ok with jokes and silliness, but it's hard to convey depth of feeling with puns and rolling eyes. So I decided this year I wouldn't use words I'd use pictures.
On a whim, I decided to make him a cookie. And not ten minutes later, I
had another whim. I decided to film the cookie being made. This cookie took a long time. A very long time! And so the film has ended up in two parts.
I had the idea for the fox and the hare from a variety of sources. As a child I loved the work of Kit Williams (I still do), and spent many hours pouring over his incredible creation Masquerade. There is a tranquil, surreal quality to his work, with a photorealism that makes his world slightly eerie. The buried golden hare waiting as long as it might take for a reader to unpuzzle the book is a haunting idea. It's hard to think of something that conveys patience and steadfastness as effectively as that hare.
More recently the work of both Jackie Morris, author, illustrator and artist, and the artist Mister Finch have intrigued me. Both use hares and foxes as recurring motifs, and both seem to me to have that eerie, tranquil quality I loved as a child in Williams's work. In particular I came across Morris's The Space Between the Fox and the Hare, where visually the space between becomes a heart shape, and of course conveys something of that awful sentiment I refuse to commit to words on the 14th February... Morris often uses gold backgrounds to her paintings, and so would I. I sprayed the blank cookie with a mixture of gold and bronze edible lustre.
So I sketched the pair within the confines of a traditional Valentine's cookie, using their curled up shapes, and the fox's tail to create the heart shape I wanted, used the Camera Lucida ipad app to transfer the image to the actual cookie, and started piping.
Once the piping was dry, I used a mixture of edible paint and lustre dusts to add definition. I think I had some idea in mind of Williams's buried hare: tones of earth and gold.
In the end, as usual, I couldn't keep it secret and I made him open the box the same evening. So he still didn't get a token of lurve on Valentine's Day itself (see the sarcasm creeping in there?). I got him a chocolate orange instead.
