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| Royal Icing Cross-Stitch Cookie |
I still consider myself new to this form of art, as I work 8-10 hrs a day, 6 days a week...so I don't get many free hours to practice this skill.
I love decorating cookies, it gets me in a relaxing state of mind. If I'm starting to feel overwhelmed, stressed, antsy, I start decorating. So in other word, this is my therapy, my shrink. You would be amazed on how many ideas pop in your head when you get to that relaxed place.
This is one of the easier patterns to follow specially for a beginner cookie decorator.
Start out with a flat sugar cookie. You don't want to have cracks, dips, bubbles, basically an uneven surface. It is critical to get a smooth, flat surface for easy cookie decorating.
The sugar cookie recipe I use is on my blog, click here
The royal icing recipe I use is a Wilton recipe, click here for the video. You will get the basic recipe here and you will have to water it down appropriately for what is needed.
Most of my icing was following the 8-12 seconds rule, which is a bit thicker then I like. The icing for the grid was a little thicker to hold it's shape.
Once the cookie is cooled, you can draw a smaller inner heart in the center of your cookie or just free outline your small heart free handed with white royal icing. It's your choice.
After you outlined the inner heart, outline the edge of the big heart. Flood the cookie between the two outlined areas with red royal icing, use a toothpick or scribe tool to smooth out the icing and pop any bubbles that might emerge.
Drop some white royal icing dots on the red icing while is still wet and with a toothpick or scribe tool drag a line through the center of each dot all around the cookie. ( I hope this sentence makes sense)
Let the cookie dry for about 20 min or so. If you are new, let it dry for a few hours, you don't want to damage the red icing with the icing tip.
Use a size 0 or 1 decorating tip to make the grid. Use the white royal icing, which is a bit thicker, and start piping parallel lines next to each other in the same direction. Once you filled the heart with those lines, turn the heart sideways and start piping another set of parallel lines that go perpendicular to the existing lines. (well another sentence that I hope makes sense to you)
Once the grid is over, you can use the same icing as for the grid to start piping the dots in the grid. A tiny bit runnier works much better as you will not have peaks on each dot. Too runny, and your dots run together. You can actually see it on the right side of the heart (your right) where two dots are kind of running together. I had to pip another dot after it crusted over so the dot can be distinguished.
The basic heart pattern is starting from the bottom working upwards:
Line 1: - 1 dot in the center
Line 2: - 3 dots in the line above
Line 3: - 5 dots in the line above that
Line 4: - 7 dots in the line above that
Line 5: - starting flush from the previous line pipe 3 dots, skip 1, pipe 2 dots
Line 6: - skip a dot and place 2 dots, skip 1, and pipe 2 dots
That's the basic heart pattern.
Once the heart is done, you can add dots to other areas if you feel the center is too plain. Where the grid meets the inside of the big heart, pipe some dots to clean up that joint.
Now is time to add an outside border to your cookie. It's up to you what you want to do...you can just add more dots. That's fine as well. Most of the time I do prefer dots over any other borders. That's just my preference.
On this cookie, I added a little scalloped edge with a red dot in the center. Once that crusted about 10 minutes, I filled the scallops with super runny white icing. What do I mean by super runny? Well, you place some icing in a tiny bowl and add water too it. You will see a foam on top of the mixture. Use a brush (that was only used for food purposes, and I mean only cookies) to place the super runny icing in the small scalloped edges.
Hope this tutorial was easy for you to follow.
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Please post your creation, I would like to see how it turned out.
Have fun and have an awesome day!
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