Decorating 17 diiferent CIRCLE cookies for Spring!

hello everyone this is grace and today we are going to be decorating this set of 17 circles all inspired very loosely by some earthy elements now i did do 17 circles 17 different designs however a lot of the techniques are repeated so this won't be a total voice over throughout the entire about an hour video i will introduce the techniques and then let you watch at your leisure so speaking of introducing techniques one of the main ones i'm doing in this set is what i'm calling a waterfall technique i i don't think there's actually a name for it but i'm calling it the waterfall technique and i think that goes nicely with the theme of this set as well so what do i mean by the waterfall technique what i mean by the waterfall technique is that the icing is actually going over the edge and it's intentional i first did this kind of intentional overflood in a popsicle class by danny lind at cookiecon in 2020 right before the world changed it was so much fun to do something kind of more realistic to have the icing actually cover all of the size well three of the four sides i should say you don't cover the bottom part of the the cookie now i will say that the way that i did it in this set was definitely the messy way and the one that wastes icing the way i learned it with danny was a much neater way um and i do plan to do that in the future but i was rusty here and just wanted to get just want to get kraken so i'm doing it on top of a paper towel for obvious reasons because you can already see that the icing has fallen over now i'm using a thicker flood here i would not recommend using a really thin flood because that's just that's just going to make a colossal mess so using a flood on the thicker end and at the same time i'm also doing what's called wet on wet design which just means i'm putting wet icing on top of wet icing so it's all going to flatten and look super cool and super flat and i just i just came up with this this design on a whim i was rusty at decorating i think it had taken like a six week break and i just needed something that was a little more free and not so precise which this is anything but precise so you can see that i'm going through in different layers and i'm just trying to fill all the major holes and i'm like okay i have enough icing at this point so let me just give this a good tap tap tap even though there are still a couple of holes but i like the coloring that i've got going on so i'm tapping it to get it to settle as much as i can and then i'm using my scribe here just to encourage a couple of those holes to just fill and now for the slightly stressful part after i give it another couple of taps to settle hey all right so i i peel this off the paper towel one half at a time excuse my hands they have icing and food coloring on them so i i didn't i didn't use that much icing i mean if you're gonna you are gonna have a problem if you really go wild like as you're icing this just barely cover the edge and you can even just i mean the next time i do this i'm going to ice it probably so that it just falls over the edge of the cookie and not like completely because it will it will fall down the side of the cookie on its own so i was able to just i'm using my thicker plastic scribe here to scrape off the edge now i did find that on some of the cookies where i use just a bit too much icing when i set the cookie down there's the first design and when i set the cookie down on the um i set it on parchment paper in my dehydrator and more icing would settle which would leave kind of a a ring of icing around the edge if that makes sense like it had it was almost like a little hat with a little edge around it which was not the effect i was going for so there is a bit of a balance of just the right amount of icing not too much like i think here i'm using too much icing because you can see on this left side that it's already well touching the paper towel like this this was too much icing whoops a doodle uh but you live you learn i'm all about learning the hard way and i'm trying something new so chances are the first time you do something new it probably won't go perfectly and that that is okay so i get more strategic the more layers i add because i'm really just trying to fill those gaps right now because i don't need to add more icing i'm just trying to fill the gaps that makes sense now you can see that i started this one the same way i started the green one but i'm going to finish it differently with a little bit of scribe work just to give it a little extra something some i wanted it to be more kind of like waves in this one so i'm using another scribe here to just do some swirlies and you can see so i was really like really attacking this like icing a bit too much um putting my scribe all the way down to the surface of the cookie so i was pulling up too much icing and actually what this kind of shows you is that there's not that much icing on top like it's a pretty standard amount of icing in fact it might even be a little less than normal if that's possible and that's why i'm getting so many breaks in the icing when i do the scribe pulls i think here i am just trying to visualize where i want to put my next ride i was trying to go in different directions too i'm just ugh i'm just so obsessed with this like this waterfall concept i'm definitely going to be using this again pretty stoked already have an idea of what i'm doing what i love to do with these shape series sets is i just take one shape sometimes in like the trees i did two slightly different versions of a tree um the heart i did in two different sizes the circles here i did in two different did i do this yeah i did these in two different sizes um and then i just let my imagination go and i just like to come up with lots of different textures and i push myself to try new things or maybe try a design on a shape that i haven't done before and i must say that circles are notorious for being very challenging shapes people tend to love or hate them i would say i'm a little in the middle i'm i'm good at i'm decent at icing them it's the baking part that i can't stand because i just my cookie recipe is not like that sturdy i guess and so whenever i try to bake them they don't turn out to be perfect circles and i even do there's a trick where um when they're fresh either when they're raw or when they're fresh out of the oven you can take a cutter in the shame same shape a little bit bigger and then circle it around the cookie dough to get the edges all nice and clean even when i do that there were still some wonky circles in this set and so i just i just kind of embrace it my style is not super perfect and immaculate like in terms of of detail and precision and life likeness so i'm okay if my circles are a little wonky i just embrace it i just embrace it so here we go with another design same waterfall concept but very different application here i'm doing like a flood pressure on my bag so this is what i would consider um like if i was flooding the cookie normally this is how much icing would be coming out of my bag so this one being a bit more intentional with how much icing is going over the edge but even then i think this was too much icing i could have done with less than this since it is flood icing it will on its own fall over the edge so next time i will probably ice it so that it just barely falls over like stop right there not go quite as far and in terms of the design i'm doing here you can see that my lines are not super clean and that's because i'm i'm doing this contact flood for the lines instead of say like piping a perfectly beautiful line like skinny line first piping with i should say with the flood consistency and then flooding something thicker next to it that would give you a much cleaner line but y'all you all know my level of patience uh i'm i think i'm being patient enough here so i made a decision that i was just gonna i was just gonna roll with my imperfect i i was i was feeling kind of mountainous here like a mountain region sort of and i was okay with it not being perfect you might notice that my white icing is quite bright and something i started doing only recently kind of begrudgingly honestly is that i've been adding white food coloring to my white and i get pretty white icing to begin with but because i use lemon juice and not say vanilla but i have found that adding some white food coloring just makes it pop so much and i use the sugar art master elite in white it's a highly pigmented powder that is activated with water i find that the gel food colorings in white are not nearly as effective so just keep that in mind but when i want a really bright white this is what i do now this was a bit more challenging i would say to take off the excess because i didn't want to ruin the pattern i just love the edges but you can kind of see that it's already starting to form kind of a like a lip around the bottom if you have a small lip once it dries you can use a microplane little food shaver thing and you can kind of shave off a little bit of the edge but if it's really a significant edge there's not much you can do about it so there we have that one this next one is just another another iteration on this waterfall technique so i'm just flooding blobs i think i was going for kind of an artistic abstract globe earth kind of thing but in the end i think it also kind of looks like camo can't like camouflage either way no real rhyme or reason to what i'm doing here but again as i'm watching myself pipe the bits that go over the edge i think i used too much icing yeah too much icing i can tell because i think the key here with this waterfall technique is you want to have to encourage the icing over the edge once you're done piping the the design on top so if it's already already fallen over on its own that means that there's just so much icing that it's just pulling it down you can see i had a really dirty tip there whoops uh and i cleaned it off real life here people i had crusty icing on the tip of my bag whoopsie doodle yeah see this looks like camo to me oh well i i still like it i think it looks cool i love anything wet on wet basically i did have some gaps around the edge you can see that i needed to fix so using my scribe here just to get them to marry themselves happily ever after next to each other [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] a voila there is the camo earthy abstract thing and here is one more of this waterfall technique this time i'm just flooding the entire surface of the cookie i think i did a slightly better job here with the amount of icing but because so actually my icing was not like as thick i think as i thought it was since it's not super thick it's already falling over quite a bit and i could have could have gone over the edge even less than this because since it's thinner it would just more naturally kind of fall over on its own [Music] [Music] all right what i'm doing next is new to me i love a good splatter but normally i mix um metallic dust with everclear so that it's wet and i do that when the icing the icing is dry but in this case i'm using powder dry and i'm just tap tap tapping it onto the wet icing i first saw the sugar arts owner holly do this on instagram and i was just so mesmerized because this is just so much faster no mixing this with anything wet it just comes straight out of the bottle i'm using the sterling pearl line here so these are kind of pearly colors and what i was concerned about because you can see there's some pretty big blobs there i thought that once this dried that those particularly the bigger blobs would smudge would come off on your hands but they did not it was the most amazing i i was dumbfounded i was i was like i'm i have to do this more often um this was so easy so i definitely recommend this technique and one day i wanted so i only used sterling pearl line which again has that kind of pearly look to it but one day i also want to try using opaque colors you can see now that the camera has focused that there's kind of a shiny shiny bit to it kind of wish that i had used even more but i think i was a little nervous about this technique and i wasn't quite ready to commit to using a lot more powder the act that i'm doing right now of kind of balancing this on my fingers is i'm balancing the middle of the cookie so because i i don't actually have the edge of the cookie touching my fingers because i would get icing oh as you can see right there i would get icing all over my fingers because the whole point here is that i'm scraping off the edge of the cookie i almost wish that i had actually taken a video even when the cookie was dry of the bottom side of the cookie just so you could see that but note to self for future sets and there we go i don't know we'll call this the splatter one this is the splatter one this is a highly anticipated technique and i know i didn't film film all of it and that is for a kind of pathetic reason in that the way that you achieve this crackle technique that you can see on the cookie is that you actually while the cookie dough is raw so you've cut out the shapes you've put them on the cookie sheet and before you put them in the oven you take white gel food coloring and you paint that onto the surface of the cookie and then when the cookie bakes it just naturally expands a bit and that's what gives you the crack now i have found that there is a sweet spot of how much to paint because if you paint not enough you won't get quite as opaque of a covering if you paint too much then you won't get the crackles because there's just it the the food coloring will just seep into the cracks instead of opening them up if that makes sense so one day um i just i don't have a good filming setup right now in my kitchen i have my filming set up for decorating but not in my kitchen poor excuse one day here i'm just doing a pretty standard pull like wet on wet pole with my scribe and i'm cleaning it off after every pull and that's very important here that's what gives me the clean start and stop and then i'm just using my scribe to help settle some of those peaks that appeared because my icing has ever so slightly started to crust and there we go there's the first crackle and on to the second one this is just the same concept but there's a little bit different of scribe work later so i'll come back when i get to that point [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] hey i'm back so this scribe that i'm doing here is different because i'm actually going to connect the scribe poll through the entire cookie i'm never going to lift it and i love this because you don't have to clean off your scribe in between the poles you could call it lazy but i like the effect and it's lazy but again i like the effect so win-win and there we have it this wave crackle this next one is an outlier i suppose to this not outlier it's the only cookie of this technique that i did so first i'm using an edible marker yes edible i'll link them in the description of the video using an edible marker to just um sketch out my design and here i'm doing what i call the beard technique i don't know if there's a better name the dabbing technique and it was born out of being too lazy to pipe dots so think of it like the motion of piping tons of little dots except as you lift up the bag you're not releasing pressure you're keeping consistent pressure the entire time and since you're keeping consistent pressure icing is coming out always and so you're connecting all the dots and if if this makes any sense so it's this up and down motion and i'm using a medium peak piping consistency here because i want it to keep this texture if i had used something softer like a soft peak piping consistency then this texture would have melted into itself and that's not the goal here i wanted maximum texture it definitely would have gone faster if i'd cut a larger tip in my bag but i didn't want such a large tip for the rest of the things that i was piping so here we are i'm going to leave you with this and i'll be back when i'm on to the next bit [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the second portion i've just been doing a flood with a thick flood here and since i used a medium peak piping consistency for the the dabbing a bit i don't need to wait until it has dried or even like completely crusted because it's it's a thick enough icing that they're not going to melt into each other if that makes sense so it's i mean yes they it is technically wet icing to wet icing but they're different consistencies very different one is a piping and one is a flood so it is okay not to wait also thicker consistencies tend to crust faster so probably did crust just a wee bit now here is another design that is completely unrelated and i'm calling this the beach towel one just because the stripes remind me of a beach towel really no reason other than that i'm using a piping consistency here i'm gonna guess this is a soft peak but it doesn't really matter for an outline you can use soft or medium and then using my scribe here just to kind of finesse the joining of the two sides of the outline and then i'm going to be piping lines here now again i'm just doing a thick flood of all these lines next to each other if you want to have a cleaner line you would pipe the shape of the line with just the thin line of the flood consistency if that makes sense so just like normal normal pressure on the bag and then flood do a thicker i mean excuse me um a firmer grip on that bag to get your flood out next but i wasn't too concerned about having a perfect line because after i pipe these after i flood these sections and it dries i will pipe a line over the top which covers up any imperfections in the lines in between these flooded sections you'll see the beginnings and the endings of my sections are not perfectly flush i guess you could say so that's why every few i go through and use my scribe to connect them i do every few because the more you can automate or like assembly line it the faster it goes and the more breaks you have to take to use your scribe it just takes longer so i'm really pushing it here because what i'm doing right now won't work very well if the icing has already started to crust and i need so i need to move pretty quickly here if you're not super confident in being able to do this quickly then i would use your scribe after every line and kind of the beauty of how i'm executing this is that the freshest line of icing is always the most recent one so at the very at the top it will have already started to crust but because i'm doing one line at a time instead of say like piping all of the dark green first then the light green if i did it that way then i would be risking um the sections crusting by the time i get to the point of actually icing the next parts and this is like this is a wet on wet technique so i want to make sure it's all fresh and wet so speaking of what i'm going to leave you here and i'll be back when this dries [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do and now i am back to pipe some lines with you so the secret to the straight line let's see it starts with a gentle contact of the icing to the cookie there is an art to how much icing comes out of your bag at that very beginning some people struggle with getting beads at the beginning of the line and that certainly happens to me sometimes too but oh you can see there there's a bead um the bead happens because there's too much icing coming out of the bag and you're not moving your bag fast enough at the same time so i got that little bead so i'm using my scribe to kind of make it go away and you always want to lift your bag off the surface of the cookie about anywhere from half an inch to an inch depending on how big of a line you're piping etc and you want to guide the icing you can see like i'm doing there now in this case my goal here was to just make sure that i was covering up the points where the icing colors met so my lines not might not be perfectly straight but they are accomplishing the goal here of hiding the little bits in between i've honestly always just been good at piping lines um but for those that struggle i definitely recommend practicing just on a piece of paper like you can get a template to just practice piping your lines and there we have the beach towel this next one actually the next few are going to be different kinds of line piping so i will probably give one intro and then and then let you watch the rest of them first off i don't think that i've talked yet about the fact that i did a one consistency outline in flood for all the cookies that i actually did an outline in flood and let's see what's the reason for that why did i choose to do that um i just did i guess especially with circles there's a lot more flexibility in the outline when you're doing a one consistency because when you do two you let the outline dry first and then flood and that outline is not going anywhere so if you did not pipe a beautifully perfect outline to your circle then there's nothing you can do once you start flooding but if you didn't quite like the outline or the the shape that you flooded at this point right here while it's still wet you could always take your scribe and uh you could take your scribe and encourage it to the edge if that makes sense i will say though obviously the cookie i just did before this i did a two consistency outline and flood and i'm actually using the same exact flood consistency so it's not like i was using a thinner one i just needed to have a solid border on my cookie before i flooded all of those stripes so this one is just a series of lines and i'm progressively making the space in between the lines bigger a lot of people tend to be amazed that i just eye this uh i don't like to plan things out unless i have to now if you are not comfortable eyeing it what you could do is you could take a ruler and actually mark out with a very small scribe tip the points of all the lines to know that you're making them progressively bigger um yeah i guess what i would do oh yeah actually i didn't even think about that okay so i was just thinking about doing like a poke in each spot but you could actually use a ruler and etch out all of the lines before you pipe them if you really need assistance with piping lines now just fyi if you do that etching method you want to make sure that your flood is completely dry otherwise you will poke a hole through that surface and it's a very light etch and there we have the progressive lines this next one this next one is this jagged mountain situation so i'm going to leave you with the flood and i'll come back when i'm ready to pipe the lines and as i'm saying that i realize i didn't talk about colors for this one and i guess it's because i don't have a lot to say in terms of the colors i was actually using reusing old icing and so i was didn't have a ton of control over the colors i always reuse my old icing i freeze it usually just in the in the bag i was using it in a big tupperware sometimes i will actually um if i have a lot of icing left that i haven't bagged yet i'll put it in a smaller tupperware um and i yeah i reuse icing all the time and that's another reason why i can't always tell you what my colors are because unless i'm actually mixing icing from scratch i don't know how i made the color even then if i'm mixing ice cream from scratch i'm always adding this and that and yada yada so for this one this is just another exercise in piping your lines but these are shorter lines so your bag isn't going to come off the surface quite as much and you have to do this contact point right so it's contact lift contact lift contact lift contact this is a tremendous exercise in knowing where your line is going to end right because if you're not very good at knowing when your line is going to end it would be really hard to do what i'm doing here which is just basically like tracing the shape over and over again and i'm trying to make it all fit into each other and be basically the same so a lot of it is just in really getting used to how fast to pipe based on the thickness of your icing the size of the tip in your bag how much pressure to apply but as always lifting that bag off the surface because that is what is going to get you a nice clean line and this here i am using a soft peak piping consistency for all of these lines that i'm doing you could use a medium peak there's not a huge difference in this case i just find that there's a little more flexibility in the soft peak it's a little more forgiving i suppose would be the way i would put it so i think i will leave you here and come back when i'm doing the lines for the next cookie [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all righty i'm back now that you have mastered your straight lines right now we're moving on to curved lines which are the most definitely i think harder than straight lines and that is because you can see here i do a contact and then i lift and i have to guide the icing with my bag in the air until it touches down let's watch this again so contact lift and i'm lifting i don't know i can't really tell at least half an inch off the surface if you ever read music not ever if you read music it's kind of like reading music because you always want your eyes ahead of the game so you know where the line is going so you know how just to guide it there sorry i'm just mesmerized looking at myself i find it very satisfying to watch real-time piping i always feel like i'm doing it so fast in the moment and then when i'm watching it it just looks so slow so slow all right so they're just a bunch more lines of this and then i do another cookie with same concept just like slightly different design so i will leave you with those and i will come back with the next brand new design [Music] [Music] my [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do hey friends i'm back this is another design concept that i first did in the tree set that i did last november december and i'm using a medium peak here just piping some pretty thick lines you can see so my my brush was a little wet i do think it's good to use a damp brush but my brush was just straight up wet and i was really trying to make it work and then eventually i'm gonna realize that i just i definitely did just wet it too much and i think eventually i will try to dry that off but i was using a medium peak here because i wanted there to retain a decent amount of texture yeah see there you go i'm wiping off my brush there was uh too much icing but also it was too wet so i'm trying to fix kind of the parts that got too wet for a second here just going for this nice ombre look i like to do the end of the color first or or the beginning um the the pure part of the color first and then move on to the mixed part now you can see i used way too much icing a couple of times i had to use my brush to take off the excess icing alas alas not the end of the world this kind of got hard the surface that i decorate on does not it's not sticky in any form so things that make it move make the cookie move um this here is diamond dust by the sugar art it is an edible glitter it's the only edible glitter i've ever used i'm not sure if there are others on the market there might be um i highly recommend it comes in lots of different colors but honestly i usually just end up using white because i feel like it just that's what kind of glistening shine looks like anyway it's just kind of this shiny you can even see it on the icing here where it's wet like it just kind of looks white um so i just kind of saved myself from buying a million different diamond dust and just get the white one i think i also have actually i have gold and i have rose gold those i think are good to have and i will link the diamond dust in the description of the video these brushes here are by borderlands bakery i do think it's good to use kind of a flat wider brush for this kind of technique application and i think i'll i'll leave you here and i'll come back on the next cookie [Music] [Music] do [Music] ah this is one of my favorite designs i've done this i've done this on every shape series yet and i almost feel like i just have to keep doing it we'll see so it's just it's so simple it is medium peak piping consistency piped out pretty big because i'm using an offset spatula with it's the smaller one but it still has kind of a big end so i need to make my dots pretty big to match the size of the spatula but you just pipe a dot and then you do this pull away i do clean off the spatula after every pull you want to make sure you do that because that gets you the best clean [Music] um tip at the top now i'm doing kind of a simple ombre here i have done this before where i have alternated every dot with a different color and that takes so much longer it's really cool looking but it takes so so much longer also the first time i ever did this i actually just use a kitchen knife from my silverware set you don't need an offset spatula a kitchen knife with a nice rounded end works just fine and i also one of the reasons i love this design and the other design is that it's one and done it's they're not a lot of i would say royal icing designs where you just do it all in one step and then you're done like this is one step and done um i'm using that diamond dust again something else a lot of people assume with this technique that i am actually using buttercream because i think it's more popular with buttercream but no this is royal icing i do this one more time on a smaller cookie so i don't do quite as many dots oops so again what i was talking about my surface is pretty slippery that i decorate on and i decorate on it because honestly it just looks nice but sometimes it makes my cookie go slightly slidey i just don't sometimes i brace it with my hand but i i don't want to have my hand in the video more than necessary but also sometimes you know you just catch your finger on some icing and then it ruins the cookie and then and then you're sad or at least i'm sad i don't know about you but i'm sad and this is the moment i go oopsies i should have done three dots and not two big ones but corrected as best i could and there we have it oh my goodness that's the entire set how did we get here well i had a lot of fun making this i hope you make this yourself enjoy this with friends family and please especially do that waterfall concept i will definitely be back with more shape series sets like this and have a sweet one bye

Channel: The Graceful Baker

Views: 37,156

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Id: nUd65QwPAVg

Length: 62min 39sec (3759 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021