Frosty Handpainted Hare

Last year my contribution to Killer Zebra's charity calendar was 'January'. (You can buy the 2019 calendar here, to which I contributed 'August'.)

A Deep, Dark, Woodfull of Gruffalo Cookies!

I recently had a request to create a small set of Gruffalo cookies. It seemed fairly obvious that I should handpaint the designs after the illustrations for the book, but I wanted to make them a little different, or original somehow.

An Autumn Cookie Jigsaw or 'Cookiesaw'

I can't deny it any longer. Summer's gone, the clocks have turned back so the evenings are dark. It won't be long before the mornings are dark too. Out come the blankets and slippers. I'd start drinking mulled wine, but apparently that's not appropriate for breakfast. Time to hibernate, like this little mouse.

Conversation with a Bee. A Midsummer Night's Dream Gingerbread Stage Set and Video

You know that scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream where Titania gets bored of the donkey and goes off to gossip with a bee? No? Understandable. It's a little known deleted scene from the play*, but having a bee in my bonnet about such things, when I was invited by Bella Baking to participate in a Midsummer Night's Dream sugarcraft collaboration, I jumped at the opportunity. Originally the idea was to reveal our work on Midsummer's Eve, but the project was picked up by Cake Masters magazine for publication in September or October (which is how I got caught out and hadn't written this post, or edited the video when the feature was published!), so we've held on to our work for quite some time!

*This is of course a load of rubbish

My first thought was to turn to Arthur Rackham's illustrations for the play. I knew I wanted to create something gnarly and natural, but what really caught my eye was this gorgeous little bumble bee painting. I knew he had to feature, and somehow he became the centrepiece, with everything else, including Titania, merely suggestive of the play.

So I knew I wanted to create lots of naturalistic handpainted elements, with a gnarled background, but that wasn't enough. I wanted to be able to convey the warm twilight of Midsummer's night, using a tiny metallic thread of LED lights I have. I had my backdrop, my lighting, I simply needed to add the rest of the stage set...

I began with a six inch square of gingerbread, microplaned after baking for perfectly straight edges. The side pieces I created by eye, out of a second six inch slab of gingerbread, using a scalpel, and a straw to create the gaps.

I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to hold up my side pieces, whilst keeping the sides free for the lighting, but in the end, I made dozens of tiny 'buttons' of gingerbread, figuring I'd stack them up with royal icing glue to make colums. I knew there was going to be fiddling and adjusting - this was not a technically accurate piece of work!

The royal icing elements I piped, again by eye, in white icing, directly onto a sheet of acetate. I piped lots of little heads, and whole bodies, so that I could choose the best. I had pictures of mushrooms and bees (inluding Rackham's illustration, above) to reference.

I handpainted all the transfer pieces once fully dry (after a couple of days) and whilst still attached to the acetate, and allowed the paint to fully dry before attempting to detach them (a tricky business as the acetate was quite stiff - I have since used much thinner cellophane, taped to card, to do this, and once the tape is cut, the flexibility of the thin cellophane makes removing the pieces much easier). I used the same handpainting technique as I demonstrate here in my Christmas Robin video.

Several heads were painted and attached to the stage side pieces, whilst I chose the smallest most delicate fairy for Titania. I barely painted her as I felt she might end up a little clumsy. Her wings I flipped over when they were dry, and used the smooth base as the upper side, and I added just a few sprays of dots above her head to imply some form of headress, seeing as she's meant to be a Queen.

I coated all the base and side pieces in stiff white icing with an offset palette knife - this was trickier than it sounds, due to all the fiddly shapes, and getting the icing to be rough in just the right places and directions. This is sprinkled strategically with white and gold tiny sugar pearls. I scraped a hole for the moon, which I then filled with flood icing. The side pieces had further wriggly piping on top, to suggest branches, roots and leaves in the Rackham fashion, and the whole was painted with washes of green and blue, with some dark bronze lustre to highlight some branches.

Construction occurred just as I predicted, with a fair amount of fiddling and adjustment. I experimented with different heights and arrangements (in the process breaking a mushroom, Titania's neck, and an entire side piece snapped in two. Still, with clean breaks, you can hide most damage!). I had quite a few little ladybirds, and mushrooms left over. I ate those.

So here's the film, vastly speeded up and edited, as altogether it was nearly an hour of film (and I didn't film the entire project. I do want to film handpainting of some of these naturalistic royal icing elements, so I've got some on the go at the moment - don't forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel so you don't miss anything!)

To take the final photographs, I wound copper wire with tiny embedded LEDs  in and around the sides; another painstaking and delicate operation for fear of pulling the heads off fairies. The whole thing was tucked into black velvet so the lights glowed prettily.

Cookiesaw! A Cookie Garden Jigsaw Puzzle

I wish to introduce a new word to the cookie lexicon: 'cookiesaw'. It's definitely a thing: a cookie array that fits together like a jigsaw, or even using cutters shaped like traditional jigsaw pieces. If I use the word often enough, I shall force it into the cookie consciousness. I have already been hashtagging it all over Instagram like someone who really ought to be a little more embarrassed by the way she behaves in public.

Anyway, I was really excited about this project from the moment I was asked to do it. A cookie set for a jigsaw and gardening enthusiast, to take the place of a cake at his birthday party. All the design elements were requested: greenhouse, favourite plants and ducks, gardening tools, I just had to figure out how to put it all together.

As usual, when something like this comes my way, I do most of my planning as I'm falling asleep, until by the time I have to start making it, I really only do a few small sketches. In fact for this project I scribbled two thumbnails. This sort of design kind of forms itself as I'm piping to be honest.

One other aspect kept me occupied as much as the design though, and that was how to create a jigsaw with enough intricacy, where the pieces fit together tightly. My cookie recipe is a light, crisp shortbread style biscuit (recipe here and cookie baking tips here) but does spread just a little. Not enough to worry about usually but when the shapes need to fit tightly it can be a problem. With this dinosaur cookiesaw I used my microplane, but its flat surface meant I had to keep the curves fairly shallow. So after a little googling I came up with a six inch, coarse 'bastard cut' file much like this one, though searching on ebay will throw up much cheaper options.

It's a small, round, coarse file presumably intended for metal or woodwork. It was cheap and very rough, and perfect. (I did of course give it a long soapy soak, a thorough scrub, and dried off in a hot oven to ensure it was safe for food use first!). In fact it worked even better than I hoped. I simply used it to 'carve' the curves here and there, constantly adjusting and testing until all the pieces fit as tightly as I could make it.

A plain base of white flood, carefully piped right to the edges of the cookies, and I was ready to go.

I didn't take a photograph of the painted base layer unfortunately, but I came to do it just as Sugar Pearls Bakes and Cakes published her final Cookie Connection tutorial, and it was the techniques in her tutorial I used to create the background colour, including the small drops of vodka, which is really effective! I simply used a large brush and moved from light blue down to dark green, dabbing and mottling, and adding further layers where necessary.

I only had to mix two colours of icing - light green and orange! The behind the scenes moments when I'm most proud of my planning skills usually involve keeping mixing to an absolute minimum. I reckoned I could get all the greens I wanted with that one base plus handpainting on top, and the whole variety of tomato colour starting with the orange icing.

I used a pico projector to pipe the greenhouse shape, but everything else was done by eye. I had a collection of photographs of the specified plants and ducks to refer to, and an idea for where I wanted the actual flowers, trusting that the foliage could be piped around to draw the whole design together.

When it came to painting, again I referred to the photographs of flowers, but I tried to ensure that each colour would complement the ones on either side. So obviously starting with red and orange tomatoes, I followed with yellow irises, then peachy-pink roses, deep rose pink camellias with violet aquilegias sprouting through them. The magnolias I kept pale against the sky.

I used the same painting technique as in my Robin cookie video: starting with basic blocks of pale colour, blending and adding darker, finer elements on top. I finished with a few garden tools here and there, subtle, blending into the background.

And then came the best bit - I had made royal icing transfers of bees, ladybirds and butterflies which I attached with enough RI 'glue' to give a little 'lift' so these elements were slightly raised. I usually ship my cookies so have to avoid doing this, so it was lovely to be able to add a third dimension to this set. A simple border of gold rectangular cookies, with one or two stray insects finished off the project.

Whimsical Flower Cookies: Tutorial

I had great fun making these, it's such a simple technique you can't go wrong. AND it includes lustre dust. If you want to see how to make more natural flowers, you might want to try my Lacecap Hydrangea tutorial.