How to Make 3-D Cookie Teacups

you hi Julia sure recipes for a sweet life I have a fun 3d cookie it's a spin on the pots of gold and Halloween cookie cauldron that I did recently we're using many of the same pieces just in slightly different ways so let's get started talking about it this is an excellent project I think for Mother's Day or for a tea party or for a spring garden party something of that sort I'm a big fan of vintage cups and saucers like these so as we go about decorating this set I'm going to be trying to pick up motifs of brown transferware and a little bit of the gilding that you see on some of these antique cups that are part of my collection so while these look very ornate it's actually a pretty straightforward project in terms of number of cookies required they're only 3/4 the cup itself a hemisphere dome which is about 3 inches in diameter and I'll have all the exact dimensions in the video description a little ring that's about the same size that rather than fitting this way as it did for the pots of gold and cauldron we're going to be flipping it upside down and creating more of a teacup shape out of it and then we've got a small little handle that I've cut from two different cookie cutters for the saucer it's a simple one-piece but it does have a lovely emboss Center and I'm going to show you how to create that in the next step so I'm going to start backwards and talk about the saucer and show you how that's shaped the thing that's novel about it is simply the embossed Center and also the size of the cookie it's about five inches across and I don't have a cutter that big so when that happens I get creative and I'm going to improvise by using a bowl standard kitchen bowl as a template and we're going to cut around that this is one of those cookies I like to roll and cut directly on my silicone mat so I don't have to transfer it it's very large so if you have to transfer it off the silicone mat onto the baking sheet it's likely to distort and we want to keep it perfectly round so simply going to place it on top not push down too hard and use a sharp lated paring knife that's clean to slice around the edge and I find that small up and down motions tends to give the cleanest cut of the dough as opposed to a big broad stroke that can leave a more jagged edge believe it or not we'll see what happens here then without lifting the ball and removing the excess dough and I like to just run my paring knife along around the edge just to pack in any roughness this is just to smooth out any rough cuts so I'm basically pressing the dough in against the side of the bowl and then we'll lift it and that looks pretty nice there's a slight depression here where the bowl was weighing down on the dough but that's going to be hidden once we iced it so I'm not too worried about it but I'm going to press in more of these jagged edges here so that it's not as rough once it's baked I think that looks good and then in the center is going to go and embossed piece and I need to make room for it so I just want to Center this ring on top of it this is about two and seven-eighths inch I believe I think that's roughly centered it's good to look at it from all directions to make sure it is we're going to pull out this middle piece that we can reserve for rolling something else I want to just put my cutter back in and make this slightly bigger then I cut it by just jostling it around a little bit you'll see why that's important I'm going to be nesting and embossed piece in there later and I need to make a little room for that I'm just going to set that aside and we're going to get another matte to do the embossed piece and for that I'm not using a conventional silicone mold instead I'm using a sugar veil mat this is something that's used to make edible cake lace but I found that it also embosses cookie dough really really nicely start by flattening it out so it covers that area and then I'm just gonna take my rolling pin and really press it in there and get it nice and flat now you'll see beauty of these silicone mats is let's make sure this is really floured so I can lift it is that they peel off very easily without that silicone without the blue mat being floured itself then I'm just going to cut out the portion I want and we'll cut around it so this is a great way to merge different shapes and textures into one cookie you could just do this as a single cookie and be quite pretty now there's a little bit of gap here but as it bakes it'll spread a little bit and the two will fuse together and you end up with a piece that looks just like that bake at 375 for my normal baking temperature and that'll be all set and ready to go cool down and you'll be ready to ice it okay so let's talk about the handle piece next because that too is done in a creative way with different cutters you can start by rolling this about an eighth of an inch thick I want it pretty delicate so it doesn't look massive once it's on my teacup so I start by cutting with my teapot cutter I just want the capture of the handle part of it I'm not going to need any of that so we're going to cut that off and then I come in with my teacup handle which is slightly smaller but use the backside of it and cut in on that to create kind of a handle shape and that looks pretty nice but it's a little open I want a little more curve to it so I'm just going to tuck it around a little bit and that'll be ready for baking and again I would just progress across the whole sheet and do a whole whole mat of them and then bake those at my normal baking temperature probably a little less than 10 minutes because they're very small thin pieces the last piece or pieces I want to show you how to make these domes I'm using my handy silicone spheres to shape them but I am elevating one of them actually probably both of them so they don't slide completely down to the bottom especially the ring you want to make sure that it it stays off the bottom edge or you'll get a lip or a foot if you will on the dough and we don't want that and you want the surface well floured again because I do have to lift this up and onto the mold here and I want to do that with minimal distortion so you can see my surface was pretty well floured and so for the dome piece I simply Center it over it and then just work it down gently work out those pleats because you don't want them in your cup you want a nice smooth cup I'm going to be dipping this later so the smoother it is the better your dipping will be to make these ring pieces I simply come in with a smaller cutter I believe this one is two in the same one I used on the plate two and seven-eighths inch across and I'm just going to use it to score a ring on top and again you want to have this as centered as possible on the dome so I'm kind of looking at it both side to side and also front to back to make sure I'm cutting or scoring an even ring and we're just going to gently press in to score this circle I don't want to cut all the way through if I cut all the way through in the baking process this will slide down and your ring will end up smushed on the bottom of the hemispheres this way by scoring it I've cut into it enough so that when it comes out of the oven warm from the oven I'll take my paring knife and just cut through it completely and then pop off this inner piece and then lift off this ring so now we want to talk about how we're going to get color on some of these cookie pieces these are going to be my handle something like this these were first piped and then sprayed I've got a number 25 tip here and a fairly thick icing that's going to allow me to get some nice little spiral spirals and other shapes on these handles let me just clean that tip a little bit and I'll show you what I mean they do a little rotation at the top to create a spiral very close to the top I don't not applying much pressure because I don't want this to be very bulky and they're just bringing it around and then I'm going to do sort of a small shell border down through the bottom so pushing forward to create a bead and then pulling back as the motion pushing forward pull back push forward pull back I've got to hold onto this little piece because it's so small likes to move I could have it on a non-skid surface that would also help and that looks lovely I've done slightly different patterns on these now I'm going to move on to dipping so I have a whole nother video that also talks about dipping contoured pieces and I'll refer you off to that for a lot of detail here I'm going to work through it pretty quickly just so you see the basics of it so ready to dip my goal is to take a piece that looks like this to something that looks like this more coated with a white this is a really irregular piece and so do expect some irregularity the dipping this is about as smooth as I can dip it we are going to be covering it with a little bit partially with some fondant pieces some stamped fondant pieces later so some small amount of irregularity isn't the end of the world that's our goal and to do that I work with icing of dipping consistency it flows gradually off the spoon you don't want it too runny or it will completely flow off the cookie so I typically add about two tablespoons of water to my thick royal icing glue so it's got some body to it and for this piece again I've got my molds elevated so that this doesn't slide all the way to the bottom and create a foot so I've got actually three stacked together for these pieces because otherwise they slide down to here and then I can't clean up the bottom edges so if this piece here I'd like to do a rotating motion I feel I get the cleanest dip this way as opposed to plunging it headfirst in I'm kind of touching it from the side so I don't mock up too much of the part that I've dipped we want to make sure you get that all the way around this is kind of a messy process I've got a fingerprint there I'm going to just submerge it one more time and then shake shake shake typically from the bottom that upper edge is a little rough but that's okay we're going to be covering that with a little bit of chocolate dough later that looks pretty good to me so I'm going to set it on my mold you'll see it slips down pretty far even with three on top but not all the way to the bottom before the icing sets I want to come in with my paring knife and just clean up the bottom edge that'll just lead leave to less of a foot or less a less roughness at the bottom so this is a little different than what I did in my other videos where I dip both pieces the same color I am doing a two-tone effect here which I think will be pretty cool so I'm going to move over to this nice plum color to dip the pull-down and again this is a similar consistency it's what I had before just going to be in a gentle stir because I don't want to kick too much air into it but in this case I like to plunge headfirst might remove the spoon to give me more access there I feel like it the best cleanest dips if I just plunge it all the way down and you certainly need a bowl deep enough small enough and deep enough so that you don't hit the bottom of the bowl when you do this otherwise you'll have kind of a dent in the icing when you pull it out I just pull it to the side and it's generally pretty smooth you'll generally see though some bubbles to start more so in this process than if you were to outline in flood so I'd like to get those immediately sometimes they'll just work themselves out as the icing flows off the sides but sometimes not so I do try to get the ones that are especially far up on the back and that looks pretty good again I think I could go a little thicker on this icing it's draining a little more quickly than it possibly needs to but I think it'll be fine set it on my mount and again same cleaning process with a paring knife or the side of my trusting needle this tool also works well just clean up that bottom edge a few times before the icing sets so you have lost a file once the icing does set okay I think that's clean enough to set aside my hands certainly aren't so I'm going to go ahead and wash those we're going to put those aside to dry ideally let these dry overnight so that I can handle them so the icing is completely hard so I've got a few pieces to spray gold I want to work in some of the gold accents that I have on my vintage teacups and a great way to do that is with edible luster spray PME brand is particularly good because it dries really quickly and doesn't pull up very much I've got a spray guard up a little backdrop and also covered my work surface with paper towels so these don't slide as much and so I don't make a whole mess of my kitchen now this is the top of the cup and this top edge has been filed and it's going to be what reveals on top and you can see it's kind of a mixture of icing and cookie right now and I want to I want to make it mostly gold I also want to coat the interior of the cup goal because that will reveal in the final project but I don't want the white to get gold so what I'm going to do is just wrap some frosting sheets some plastic would do as well around these pretty tight to create a collar to protect the sides from getting sprayed we're going to do this one first you want to make sure it's pretty taut though otherwise some of the gold color color can sneak under I'm going to concentrate my spraying on the inside of it mostly though because I am also going to be covering the top lip with modeling chocolate so it's not too important that that be evenly coated gold is more important that I get the inside I might even bend this over a little bit so that I'm sure not to get the sides of the cup because that would be kind of disastrous then we'll come back and spray my handles and the saucer give it a good shake hold it at a distance again just concentrating mostly on the inside I'm going to get it from this side as well you can also rotate the piece that gives you better visibility and I'm not going to do much more on the edge because I don't want to get the white gold let's see what that looks like I think that looks pretty good so I'm going to move that off to the side because we're going to be doing additional work on that later and then just quickly spray these remaining pieces my icing here is completely dry so it out it and so that the color stays more fast and doesn't absorb into the icing when I get both sides of the handles that's the other reason to have the icing dry so you don't smoosh it when you flip it over so you'll notice I actually have what seems to be tea in my tea cups in the top that just meets that gold area on the upper brim and that is actually isomalt which is a form of sugar that is less prone to wilting and less prone to clouding than actual real sugar so we're going to work with it so if you want to use these on display for a long period of time if not eating them immediately then isomalt is the way to go i sum up malt comes in sort of this I wouldn't say it's a powdered form they're little small granules you can get in different forms I'm working with this form here and we got two cups in this pan we're going to add a half a cup I'm going to bring it to about 280 degrees Fahrenheit so you do need a candy thermometer for this process at that point I can add my color and I'm just going to add probably about two drops of my chef's master liquid gel food coloring and about one drop of Buckeye Brown and that's going to make a nice tea color similar to that then continue to take it up to 320 degrees Fahrenheit at that stage when it's poured it will set very firm and candy like if you don't take it to quite that temperature it can be soft and will ultimately wilt this piece is suspended in the middle of the cup and so you don't want it so soft that it actually sags in Wiltse you want it to stay very very flat so it's critical to use the candy thermometer for this once it's out we're going to be pouring it into the center of the Ring that I just sprayed so I've got that on a silicon lined mat so that once the candy sets it'll easily pop off we'll come back to that you could use parchment as well but parchment tends to buckle particularly when you pour hot syrup on it so you'll get a more wavy looking tea if you use parchment paper so I'll set that aside I'm just going to add water to this and get it started and then we'll put it on the stove just adding enough water to make a sludge basically you don't have to have a lot it will liquefy when it gets on the stove it was half a cup to two cups of the isomalt just want to get it started here so it's all hydrated before we start heating it and I'll start it on about medium to medium-high and then jack up the temperature is it's more dissolved if you have any crystallized still crystallized isomalt and the size of the pan at this stage you can try rinsing them down but it's best to try to keep them out of the syrup because you don't want that pouring into your final product otherwise it looks clear except for those pieces there so I'm going to try to avoid them so we're at about 280 degrees Fahrenheit and that's why they that's when they say you can add color I'm not sure why that temperature is so critical for color addition but we're going to go with what they say and I just want to put in a couple of drops of yellow I believe start with one first in one of brown and see what kind of color that makes want it to be kind of T like and I am going to have to give it a little stir for this I think it's a little too Brown so we're going to add another drop of yellow now I might not be bad tighten it up a little bit and now we want it to go till three give another stir to get that yellow distributed I think that's a nice rich tea color definitely not a light tea but a dark blend looks a little darker than the pan and it actually will - I think when it gets poured and we're just going to let this go to 320 and then we'll let the bubbles subside before we pour it because you pour it with all the bubbles the bubbles will actually set and we don't want a bubbly tea so it's up to 328 starts moving very quickly temperature-wise towards the end and as you can see there's still a lot of bubbles in there so I want to let this just sit until all the bubbles subside you don't want to let it sit too long because it'll start to set and we need to pour it while it's fluid but if I pour it with all those bubbles the bubbles will end up in the tea as I said earlier so most of the bubbles have subsided I just need a very thin layer in the bottom you can see how much later it looks here still got a few bubbles in there I just want to make sure it comes all the way to the edge of the teacup they pour a little bit more in and that looks good we're going to set that aside that have completely set up this sets rather quickly it could be a matter of a couple of minutes okay so I've set this about five minutes only and all occasionally tested to make sure it removes from the map but if as long as you can peel it off as you can see it's fully set it does pick up some texture from my mat my mat has some texture so if you don't want that texture you can do it on parchment paper but as I said before that parchment paper will buckle when you pour the sugar syrup on it so you get more of a wave that's completely flat which I kind of like so now the next step I want to do before I put it on my base here is just trim out the tops there's still a lot of unevenness and uneven spraying so I cut a little band a little ring I should say of chocolate dough this is my modeling chocolate and I have a whole another video about how to make that just rolled this through my pasta machine to the number three or number four setting and use two cookie cutters to cut out the ring and I think that's just going to trim off the top a little bit more neatly so to adhere that I just use a little bit of corns here but I want to make sure not to get this on that lovely clear tee that I just made so be careful not to drip it just keep corn syrup off the top of the ring if you can it's my rings a little small for the teacup top so I but the chocolate the good thing about chocolate dough is it does stretch so I'm going to just stretching it out to the edge completely to the edge as much as I can looking at it from the top to make sure it's a nice fit okay now we're ready to mount it onto my purple face I again have actually filed these pieces down for good fit before I start sticking them together and I do that with my micro planer you'll see that it's nicely filed at the top so I know I'm going to have a nice tight fit and I have a front marked here with edible marker and I'm going to line that up with the front I'm nesting it in a little trivet it's just a silicone rivet that I cut back so it just fits there nice and perfectly so it won't rotate as I'm doing this part I like to do the piecing of this Cup together off the saucer so I don't mess up the saucer the saucer still needs to be decorated so we're going to do this piece first and then come back to the saucer my front was marked here it's hard hard to see now with the tea now you'll notice that there is not there's a little bit of a gap between the bottom and the top it's not quite seamless here but we can clean that up and we're going to kind of disguise that because I'm going to be laying some fondant pieces stamped fondant pieces all the way around to create that upper trim and now we're ready to put those little fondant pieces on I've pre-cut some I'm going to show you how to stamp a couple and then I'm just going to put them all around the top so this is very similar to what I did with the stamping in my recent quiver video where I rolled out fondant in the number three setting on my pasta machine which is about a sixteenth of an inch thick and then stamped it with food coloring and created some really pretty pattern very quickly that way you could of course hand paint this you could decorate this Cup and myriad ways you could hand-painted if you're an excellent hand painter that would be one way to go but stamping is a great way to add a lot of lavish detail really quickly so to do that I've rolled my fondant nice and thin I'm going to re-ink this foam pad this came without any food coloring on it originally I'm just applying my normal liquid gel food coloring to get it moist spreading it around and blotting off any excess and then I just want to select out a portion of a stamp I'm using a large self-adhesive stamp and I'm just going to select out the inner portion to create these little scallops but I so I'll end up with a lot of stamped fondant that I won't be using on the piece but we can ball that up we need it and I'll turn into brown and we can use it for another project just stamping the piece that looks pretty good I'm just going to stamp a bunch of them because I'll need a few of them need about 12 so to create these I'm just going to take my small cutter this is about 7/8 of an inch just Center it on that little piece we like cut out a bunch and these are going to get cut in half to form the scallops I'm going to cut them all in the same direction so I've got two little loops at the top of each half circle so it's completely symmetric when it's applied my food coloring here is still a little damp I can see it glistening so I just want to be careful about handling the faces of these too soon so I'm going to try working with some of the older ones I cut earlier and hope that they can form nicely to the cup and then come back to these that are a little bit more moist so I'm just applying a little bit of corn syrup to the back of the piece ideally with a clean brush and tucking it in to fill in this gap here these old pieces are going to work fine I think and I'm going to work front and then one side part way around and the other side part the way around so that if they don't meet perfectly in the back that there there will be a seam in the back as opposed to it being somewhere towards the front of the cop so I typically work side to side on things like this so again at this point I would stand up and just make sure it's looking good so the next step is to hide this seam even further by putting up a brown band and then we're going to come in in detail with some dot work okay so I have cut a modeling-chocolate band it's the same material I used to cut the little disc on top and that's just going to conceal that central seem all that much more I find that's easiest to put up onto the cookie when it's on its side and to gradually work it around and again we're going to do that with just a touch of corn syrup I am going to apply it to the band not to all the band it wants just from the center and then we'll work it around the sides I just want to get it as straight as possible now at this point you do need to pick it up and kind of work it around to the back until you get it get the back piece completely secured it's cutting my back seam okay now my band is a little irregular at this point so I do want to elevate this and just while the dose in the corn syrup are still drying still not completely secure I can kind of get it in good position with my paring knife just straighten out any low parts like for instance is low here so I'm pushing it up slightly I think that looks pretty good on to detail work because God is in the details I'm going to add little brown dots around the scallops as I said I just think that trims them out and I'm working with my icing of bead or consistency relatively loose about two to three tablespoons of water for every cup of my icing glue and it forms a nice rounded dot on that zone and I'm just squeezing ever so lightly that this highly elevated so it's a it's a die level that's the best way to ensure that the dots look around when you're piping on the side of something and the last thing I want to do is trim out with bigger white dots right along the bottom and just above the band just to fill in some of the some of the distances that band create some of the little ledge that that band creates we're going to fill in with dots and I think that'll help disguise it so I've got an ivory color is the same color we dipped the upper part of the Copts in looks pretty good and I'm going to now just do a under layer right underneath the band as well and for this I'd like to start in the back so that I don't have a seam in the front where they join okay and that's it we're going to set that aside to dry we're going to just do some stamping on the saucer and then put it all together okay so now we're on to making the saucer I have since I stand top coated it let it dry and I want to create this kind of transfer wear like pattern on top and I'm going to do that by stamping you could of course paint too or additionally pipe on it but I like the low relief of the stamp and the uniformity of this stamp I wanted a really regular pattern evenly spaced and I thought I'd have more control if I were stamping as opposed to painting so I've got some cool stamps they're going to allow us to do that I've also created a template here on paper so that that fits my cookie so that when I place it here I know exactly where to anchor my stamps so I'm going to start with my big kind of honeycomb stamp and put one at each of those lines so we'll that'll ensure that it's more or less perfectly symmetrical and then we'll add in the other details around it these are all self-adhesive stamps that I'm working now with now and they're on an acrylic block which is cool because it allows me to really locate them very precisely pressing harder than you might think to make sure to make good contact everywhere on the stamp that looks on that cookie rather that looks good and we'll just rotate that and now I'm just going to show you how I complete one of the patterns we do this of course all the way around now I've got this nice little leafy effect then I'm going to use in two directions on either side of the honeycomb just joining the stem this is why I love these acetate stamps because I can see exactly where I've placed it and I'm going to do that on the other side as well and I would complete that all the way around before taking the stamp off but to complete this little pattern I'm putting on a third stamp which is a little leaf and that's just going to fill in those gaps where the honeycomb meets the longer branch now if you happen to not get a perfect stamp I was really lucky in this case you can always come in with a fine line edible marker and fill in like for instance this isn't quite as dark as some of the others so I could draw over it if I wanted to it's not quite the same color you can also add little flourishes I added on this particular plate here you'll see I have little dots at the top of the honeycomb and in between the patterns those I all did with this fine edible marker as well just to add touch more interest so that's the process of stamping and completing of the plate we're going to move forward now to getting this Cup together because I've got one that's already completely dry and it's also been trimmed out with a little bead work on the edges to match the bead work on the cup okay now this I've allowed or you should ideally allow this to completely dry because we are going to be handling this to mount it and I don't want to smudge any of my dots mine might still be a little bit wet so I'm going to be extra careful to mount on same similarly here these dots should be completely dry now I'm going to mount it and I like to nestle it into a bit of fondant rather than gluing it directly to the cup that gives it a little bit of lift but it also gives it a little nesting spots those less likely to topple around as I mount it and I've got thick royal icing glue I'm using white here so that if any Peaks out actually we'll take a little bit off doesn't always stick to them to the spray so well so sometimes you have to put a little bit down and take it off which is what I did just get that little fondant nesting place ready and a little bit of white glue so that if I do have to move the cup around it's easy to clean off the bottom of the cup easier certainly than another color and my fate front face is facing me right now I am going to try to look at this from all directions and make sure it's relatively centered side to side and also front to back before I anchor it and I think it's okay so I'm going to press down on an ever so gently and you can see the fondant gives it just enough space that it doesn't really not so visible and you don't really need to prop it but you wouldn't need to allow probably an hour is worth of drying time before you really want to pick it up and move it around because it can flop over I think that looks pretty good we're going to move forward though and put on a handle I have a number of options as one's I sprayed earlier that are really gold but there's not as much gold exposed on this cup as there is on the one that I sprayed gold so I think I'm going to resort to a simple one that I diced earlier in purple so that it matches and I'm going to anchor it right about here where there's a big gap and to do this I'm just going to use a little white glue at the top and hopefully that'll be enough to anchor it otherwise I might need to reenter it with a little white glue and a little gold blue at the bottom try to match the color of the glue to what it is I'm gluing it to purple glue at the bottom would also be good too because it's going on a purple cup I think that looks pretty good the other thing you want to make sure is that it's straight from the side and if there's any propensity for it to slip down you can slide a little bit of paper towel underneath to keep that prop but mine is staying there so I think that's just fine okay so here you have the finished cookie teacup and it's barely distinguishable from these real vintage teacups in my collection I've picked up elements of the transferware by stamping on the saucer and also on fondant on the upper edge of the cup and also gilded accents by spraying with gold luster spray but of course you can choose to decorate these any way you want you could hand paint them you could stencil them as I stenciled the one up top you can really get fun and creative with them they're perfect for weddings they're perfect for Mother's Day they're perfect for Tea Parties just a whole range of occasions so get creative with this project and until the next one live sweetly you

Channel: JuliaMUsher

Views: 581,001

Rating: 4.8826928 out of 5

Keywords: Food & Drink, 3-D teacup cookies, teacup and saucer cookies, tea party cookies, three-dimensional cookies, mothers' day, mother's day, How to, how to make, tutorial, cookie, decorated cookie, cookie decorating, decorating techniques, Julia M Usher, Recipes for a Sweet Life, Ultimate Cookies, Cookie Swap, baking, decorating, desserts, sweets, isomalt tea, contoured cookies, rubber-stamped fondant

Id: f2kHxwKnOQ8

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2016