Tuesday 30 September 2014

Ladybird Ladybug, a Cookie Tutorial and Video!


I made these little mini ladybird cookies for the Queen of Ladybirds's birthday and I thought you might like to know how they're made as it's really quite simple!

What you will need:

Egg shaped cookies
Edible pen or scribe for transferring the pattern
Red and black, and just a little cream 20 second royal icing
Black piping icing
Black metallic edible paint (optional)

Lets start with the simpler version: 'Bird's Eye View'


1. Draw the outlines of the head, nose and wingcase of the ladybird onto the egg shaped cookie with an edible marker. You can either copy freehand, or copy/paste and print out the above photo to use as a template.
2. Taking the cream 20 second royal icing with a tip 2, pipe a couple of blobs either side of the nose and a couple more above. Make them irregular in shape, but symmetrical - the key to the bird's eye view is symmetry!
3. Immediately pipe around the cream in black 20 second icing and let the surface crust.
4. Fill the nose area in black and add two cream blobs, like 'eyes'.


5. Pipe one wingcase in either black or red and...
6. immediately pipe a few irregularly shaped blobs in the alternative colour. Let this crust over.
7. Repeat with the second wingcase, adding blobs to be symmetrical to the other side.
8. Once the surface is dry enough to take stiff piping on top, pipe a couple of antennae curving back from the side of the 'nose' and ending in small blobs on the wingcases.

Now for the 'Ant's Eye View'... The stages are identical as above, except I allowed the red to dry thoroughly, then painted the spots on with black. You could instead just pipe wet on wet black spots. In this case I tried to maintain both symmetry and perspective, to give the impression of the spots disappearing over the ladybird's back. I also added three little jointed legs emerging from beneath the wingcase.


Try and make sure you keep the red nice and puffy (keep it thick and use a fan or dehydrator).






Here she is on her nest of leaves. Try flipping the outlines to create ladybirds heading off to the right too. That way they can pair up and dance.



The Ladybird Queen (seen here on her pumpkin throne) was created in the same way, just on a larger egg shaped cookie and with the addition of pupils to create eyes, pouty lips, and of course a gold crown.


And from the ridiculously large to the ridiculously small, a quick video showing how to make life sized RI transfer ladybirds...




That's it for Autumn this year, just a big bunch of beetles. If you fancy trying other insects, there's some pretty frosty spiders on my tutorial feature at Cookie Connection here.


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