How to Make Simple Marbled Cookie Flowers and Leaves

hi Julia sure recipes for sweet life I'm back with a super easy video but one by popular demand I've been asked ever since I published my Easter basket cookies a year ago how the heck did I make those marbled flowers and leaves that go into the top of the baskets and they're actually pretty straightforward it's a classic marbling technique I would say if you've never marbled before check out my marbling 101 video first because this is simply an extension of this will be marbling with three colors today to create these daisies and three colors for the leaves but first let's start with the daisies I'm going to be aiming for something that looks like that or like that and I've got a whole bunch of other color variations that I'll show you towards the end because by changing a couple of variables with marbling you can get very different results and we'll talk about those variables a little bit more as we move forward the key thing with marbling is to have all your icings at the right consistency before you start and have them all bagged up and ready to go I work with parchment cones as you probably know by now as opposed to pastry bags most of the time and I have a whole video about how to make those so I refer you you to that and all the icings I like to have roughly at marbling consistency with the exception of one I'm going to start first by putting down a pretty heavy purple border just to give the cookie some oomph on the edge and for that I like to use icing of outlining consistency so for each cup of my royal icing glue I usually add about 1/2 teaspoon to 3/4 teaspoon in water to it so it's relatively thick it holds a nice firm line when I pipe it without spreading too much and that's that's what I want but I think I want a slightly bolder border on these cookies so I'm opening up my tip a little bit I'm going to start by outlining the petals with purple you could use another color but I like to have the dark color on the edge now if your icing is too thick it tends to go straight and you'll want to pipe slower to get around the curves if it's too thin you need to pipe faster because the icing will tend to wiggle back and on itself and not not go straight so I'm kind of adjusting my speed for the consistency of this icing most of my petals look pretty good except for that one I got a little a little wobbly but we're not going to worry about it too much so many different ways you can decorate daisies I'm just showing you the ones that are in those baskets because I've gotten lots of questions about them and you'll notice my piping technique I touched down to start the line but then I'm not dragging the tip sort of letting the icing fall and the natural curve that it will take and then just touching down again in the center to make contact when I'm done with the petal if you don't like a particular pedal shape if some look fatter to you and others are too narrow the best thing to do is to wait for the icing to dry rather completely tilt crusts and then take your trusty needle and lift it off and repipe it if you try to take it off now while it's wet you'll just smear that purple icing everywhere and it will stain pretty much everything even these dark cookies I'm not going to be too fussy about petal size because in nature flowers are pretty different anyway now typically before I would start the marbling process that's an outlining process I would let that border crust until it was no longer shiny that just minimizes the chance of that dark border bleeding in to the colors that are going to go inside but when I marbled all the colors are going down wet-on-wet they're going to wet next to each other so there's always some risk of colors bleeding in the marbling scenario because they are going wet next to each other before they drive I try to work with marbling icings that are as thick as possible they certainly can't be as thick as my outlining consistency here because when I try to drag my trusty needle through them to create that scrolling pattern it'll leave tracks so they need to be somewhat looser typically for marbling I add a teaspoon or so of water to the icing to loosen it up but if you get it too loose then you increase your chances of bleeding so I try to push this thick as possible for the task at hand so just to give you an idea this was the outlining consistency I used for that purple that went down on the edge of the Daisy kind of plops off the spoon whereas the marbling consistency that I've got for the blue I'm going to be putting blue yellow and purple in the flower so a lot looser kind of runs off more gradually and I'm also looking just for how it handles under the spoon more often than not you can find all my consistency adjustments on my website one thing I do need to adjust before I can Marble this one successfully my yellow and my blue are at the right consistency is the purple because it was at outlining consistency so I'm going to show you how I adjust that because that's a useful task again pretty thick one way to adjust really with control is to have your water in a squirt bottle because you can just put in a very little amount that way if you overshoot with too much water it just takes so much powdered sugar to get it back to the right consistency so I do like to add my water rather gradually this is still kind of pretty thick so I'm going to add a little bit more water trying to get it closer to that consistency you saw with a blue earlier I think that looks pretty good load up another cone with that and we'll be ready to marble now as I said with marbling you like to have all your icing is ready to go and in their cones because you can't allow any waiting time marbling is basically an extension of wet-on-wet I'm going to be putting the icings down wet next to each other and then drawing my trusting needle or a toothpick through them to create swirly patterns in this case it's a really simple marbling pattern it's just a little stroke that I'm putting down there to create a little frill on the dais you get much more complicated with this and you'll see more complicated patterns in my marbling video but if you have to wait you know if you're getting your icings ready you put one down and you're waiting to get your other one ready your icings will set up in the meantime and you'll get a really crusty looking marble really cracked looking marble when you run the trusty needle through it okay normally I would have let these set maybe try it a little bit longer you can still see some Sheen in the middle of that Daisy but we're going to move forward and because I like to work with the icings as wet as possible I'm going to work one petal at a time or maybe two petals at a time but I'm not so I'm going to lay purple blue and yellow side-by-side stroke it then do the next one next one next one next one I'm rather than laying all the colors at once again for the same reason that if if I lay all the colors and then come back and put try to run the trusting needle through it I'm going to end up most likely with a pretty crunchy looking marble so here I am just piping the colors in side by side and and we're their little piece little ends sticking up or where they don't quite come to the edge of the petal I'll use my trusty needle to knock the color over but that's that's filled that cavity pretty well and now I want a stroke well I can well the icings are still wet to create that marbled effect my hands are a little shaky today so I didn't get quite a good stroke by stroke twice on that one and they got a little bit of color down here that I don't like I'm going to try to pick that out let me continue with that let's see how nicely they're flowing into each other it looks quite good when I marbled I try not to hit my cookie itself I kind of tripped up on the cookie when I marbled that first petal and so I didn't get a smooth stroke as I wanted because I hit the underlying cookie I try to be about halfway through the icing I'm going to complete this one come all the way around doing the same thing and I'm cleaning the tip at the end rather than going right directly back in the center and that just keeps any yellow from ending up in the center in that dark purple area if you wanted yellow there you wouldn't clean the tip and I'll show you that on the next round so there's a lot of subtlety you can get with marbling the other thing I'll say about marbling is I like to draw dark colors into lighter colors typically so in this case I'm drawing the darkest color purple through the next darkest color which is blue and then into the yellow and I think you see the purple in the yellow when that stroke hits the yellow better than if you were to draw the yellow into the purple so bear that in mind too I tend to get a better result we need more bold arc into light and he ends here you can knock down if they don't fall down themselves now let's talk about the variables that affect marbling I talked about I alluded to them at the beginning of the video there are a couple one are the number of colors you lay down so here I'm laying down three side by side but you can get a very different look if you lay down at just a different set of colors side by side I'm going to show you some different effects using the exact same method just altering the colors and you'll see that the flowers look very different so one is the colors you use the other is the manner in which you lay the colors down next to each other or on top of each other here I'm laying them side-by-side but you can create different marbled patterns by piping lines on top of a solid color and then drawing the trussing needle through it or dots on top of a solid color and then drawing a trusting needle through it you'll see some of those kind of style variations in my marbling 101 video and then the last variable is the manner in which you draw the trusty needle or the toothpick through the icings you could do it in straight lines like I'm doing here very very simple or in squiggly patterns or back and forth and again I have a lot of those style variations in that marbling 101 video I'm just going to complete the last petal and you'll have a nearly completed Daisy one thing I've done with these days is that you see in front of me notice how poofy they are and how they have a nice satin finish I like to finish these cookies when I can small cookies especially in the dehydrator just quick dry them for a few minutes at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit causes the icing to pouf a little bit which looks particularly cute on these daisies and it also sets them with less of a mat and more of a satin finish which can be very very pretty if I were to let this dry as it is it might the icing might sink a little bit and it might appear less matte when it's fully dry so there you have a simple marble Daisy just some variations on that here I did three strokes instead of two not a big deal and then just as an example of the color variations that you can achieve here's an example of me starting with purple pink and then blue and here purple blue and then pink and I've got just you know a spectrum of different flowers just by changing the colors around so it's kind of fun now as far as the center what to do there typically I would let that completely dry before I would put a Center on top because there's just too much risk of messing it up but I'm going to try to drop a transfer on here to make a center and I I did that somewhat successfully I kind of crunched the icing here to the sides but I think that looks rather pretty I can fill in with some dots around it a little bit later if I'm really picky I'm back with marbling part 2 we're going to show you how to do these little leaves super simple they involve icings of three marbling consistencies light green and medium green in a dark green but also dark green of outlining consistency so I'm going to start this again with the thicker icing going down first and then I'll adjust it to the marbling consistency when I lay it in the middle of the cookie so I'm using a thicker icing to create this ruffled edge because if I were to use an icing a marbling consistency just all kind of smudge into each other as soon as I piped it so I want something fairly stiff to hold its shape initially I'm only going to outline these were kind of asymmetrical leaves I'm only going to outline one side of them because I find when I do the marbling and I draw I draw my trussing needle this direction sometimes an outline and the other side can kind of interfere with the drawing of the truss on the trusting needle through the icings so to do this edge I start by piping a line as you saw now I'm just doing kind of a trailing beaded border pushing out to create a bead pulling back pushing out to create a bead pulling back all the way down this side it creates a nice little frilly effect so start by piping the line touching down not dragging the icing touching down to will stop stop the flow at the end now push forward pull back push forward pull back push forward pull back you can push the icing away off the side and get the edges kind of sticking out even further okay so that looks pretty good I'm going to let those kind of partially dry again till crust forms to kind of minimize bleeding and I'm going to get my green closer to a marbling consistency here it is at outlining consistency clinging to the spoon pretty solidly so I need it a little bit looser because I am going to run some right down through the middle of the cookie and again I've exact consistency adjustments to a cup of my royal icing glue like how much water you would need to add to get it to marbling consistency there is a range on it obviously if I'm marbling a bigger cookie I might have it looser than if I were marbling a smaller cookie and there was fear of the icing running off the side so there's always a range on some of these consistency adjustments I think that's better I don't want it too loose or sometimes it can lose definition when it's marbled into the other two colors so back into a new bag this is the beauty of parchment cones I don't have to rinse out a lot of pastry bags in between just make up a bunch of cones before I get started and I'm going to leave we'll try this different ways right now I have barely an opening on the cone you can see what kind of a fine line is coming out I might try really fine marble through the center of the first one and then we'll open up the bag a little bit and I'll show you how you might get a slightly bold or look just by making the line a little bit bolder okay so I've got two different shades of green and these other cones and it doesn't really matter which you lay first I'm going to start by laying the light green about filling up about half the leaf with it you could just do one color in here if you wanted that's fine too I just kind of like the two-tone effect a little more in the middle here and where it doesn't come all the way to the end and I want to get into these finer spots particularly cuz my icing around it's still wet I'll use my trusty needle I'm not going to put this one as close to the edge because I'm going to be marbling off to this side and some of the icing will be dragged that way anyway when I'm run the trusty needle on that direction so I don't really want it to run off you could leave it just like so this is kind of a wet by wet technique that kind of looks cool or you could just put a little vein a thin vein down the center like so wet on wet and leave it like that that looks really pretty but we're going to go ahead and Marble it and again I used a pretty thin to Marble it I'm just going to run the trusty needle up in this direction and sort of little half circles again could do it any which way but that's what I did on that particular cookie and I'm seeing little Peaks here because my icing might be a little thicker than the stuff I used on the daisies I could thin it out or I can sometimes just knock those out with my trusting needle now let me try that that's one marbled effect I'm going to try it with a slightly bigger vein down the middle just to give you a sense of what a bolder leaf might look like not being too neat with the medium green because as far as the center seam because I'm going to cover it with that dark green line later as you saw so it doesn't have to be super neat get a little closer to the edge of this time and then I'm just kind of pushing the icing around to make sure that any gaps between the two colors are filled I have one right here so I want to push that closed not really adding too much icing now I'm just kind of scooching around with the tip what I have already laid just being super careful because that border is still wet normally I would let that dry a little bit longer okay and now I'm going to just open up that dark green that I used before the tip a teeny bit that's open less than 1/16 of an inch but you can see the difference it makes and piping it again pretty just like that or we can just draw the lines through it and I'm getting little peaks at the end again I think my colors are a little too thick or it's very dry in here but I can knock some of that out just with the tip of my trusting needle so that's a basic marbled leaf and a marbled Daisy in my spring Easter basket video I show some tips for how you can mount them on sticks and actually get them in baskets and arrange them in various ways so you might want to check that out till next video live sweetly you

Channel: JuliaMUsher

Views: 200,666

Rating: 4.9157624 out of 5

Keywords: how to marble cookies, wet on wet cookie flowers and leaves, marbled daisy cookies, marbled leaf cookies, spring flower cookies, flower cookies, marbling with royal icing, royal icing wet on wet technique, wet-on-wet cookies, Cookie (Type Of Dish), How-to (Website Category), 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

Id: NIAtYgOsEE0

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2015