How to: Make Character Cookies

A month ago was my Grandma's 90th birthday, and to celebrate my family all went to dinner.  I made these cookies to go on the place settings when everyone was seated.  My Grandma loves Tweety so we went with him for the cookies.  Decorating cookies is what I specialize in...especially character cookies.  Once you learn how to do a basic character it's easy to take that idea and use it as a template for any other characters you do.  Especially animation characters with black outlines.  This tutorial is to show you how to do a basic character.  The more you decorate the more you'll learn how to break down a design and in what order to decorate it.  This tutorial will show you how to decorate Tweety, with general instructions that will apply to any cartoon character!

Tweety Bird Cookies

Decorating level: Medium
Concept and execution by Jesika Rose, Tweety Bird is a creation of Bob Clampett, Looney Tunes, and Warner Brothers.  I claim no ownership of his design and these cookies were for personal use only.

• Gluten Free Chocolate Sugar Dough Recipe or the gluten free regular sugar dough recipe of your choice.  I'll be posting a "regular" gluten free dough recipe in the next few weeks =)
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" Circle Cutter
• 7 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Two #3 round tips
• Four #2 round tips
• Four #1 round tips
• Toothpicks 
• Edible Ink Food Safe Markers
• Gel food coloring:
• Sky Blue
• Lemon Yellow
• Orange
• Black

Jesicakes has been very busy...

...but I will return with new recipes next week!  I'm planning on trying a vegan and gluten free recipe inspired by my mom who just made the transition from vegetarian to vegan.  Also I have a lot of lemon curd in my freezer left over from of the reasons I haven't posted in a while so I'm going to make Poppy Seed Lemon Linzer Cookies.

So the past few weeks I did the dessert tables for two events! 

Ocean Themed Decorated Sugar Cookies

A few weeks back I decided to have some fun after work and make some ocean themed sugar cookies.  I hadn't decorated in a while and missed it...so I picked up some new cookie cutters along with some marine ones I already have and decorated cookies of my other great passion, marine animals and the ocean.  I had so much fun doing this cookies.  Especially the octopus and the whale which I designed myself on a round cookie (I wasn't liking the whale cutters I found and I didn't have an octopus).

Butterfly and Circles Decorating Tutorials

 This weekend I helped out at Compost for Brooklyn's Block Party.  I donated packs of decorated gluten free sugar cookie butterflies with gluten free chocolate chip cookies for their bake sale.  I also helped out at the booth then lead a decorating demo for the kids at the block party and let them have their go at decorating!  Afterwards I came home and made video tutorials for decorating butterflies.

Decorating using "pulling" is such a fun way to decorate.  I think every butterfly I made was different.  It's such a great way to experiment with what you can do with royal icing!  It's a process that requires speed though, so I couldn't really do photo tutorials so I tried my go at videos!  Unfortunately I didn't put my camera quality on high, so the video isn't HD (by any means) but I think you can still see everything fine and hopefully I explain it well too.  So the first video is the butterflies above, and also these "monarch" style butterflies:

I also did a second video for decorating circles with pulls to make borders and starbursts.

Butterflies for the Community

This Sunday (June 3rd), I'll be donating 24 packs of gluten free cookies with one chocolate chip cookie and one of these butterflies to Compost for Brooklyn.  It's a local community project about ecological restoration and reducing and recycling waste with their compost program.

They're having a block party this Sunday:

If you're in the area you can stop by, buy some delicious baked goods, enjoy live music, and even get a free tree!  Also, I'll be doing a decorating demonstration! I'll show how to make these butterflies, how to make monarch style butterflies, and basic techniques in pulling. 

If you can't make it out, Justin will be taping the demo and I'll post it as my first video tutorial! This is a technique that requires immediate action once you've flooded the cookie so it's difficult to take step by step photos. 

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My eRecipe Page

Like my dessert recipes?  Well on top of baking, I love to cook in general.  So while I want to keep this blog strictly desserts/sweets (with maybe the occasional indulgent breakfast item like my gluten free pancakes), for all other meals of the day you can visit my eRecipe page.  As long as things are still going as planned, I'll also be Chef of the Week there the last week of October (I'll post more when it gets closer and I know more).  So far I have my desserts you've seen here, but also a recipe Gluten Free Spinach, Escarole, and Goat Cheese Lasagna, and a recipe for Sauteed Swiss Chard and Pomegranate.  I'll be posting a lot more on there in the next few weeks.  While desserts are what I love most and how I make my living, cooking everything from breakfast to dinner is also my passion.

Miss Me?

I really would love to update this every weekend.  This weekend I didn't because I normally don't work Saturday's or Sunday's but worked both.  Today we were in a street fair so it was a busy week preparing for it too!  As of right now I'm lying down after a 50+ hour work week ready to sleep through Monday all the way to Tuesday morning where I'll wake up and start a new week of work!  I LOVE my job but baking and decorating can be tough work, especially when the week is ended with a 10 hour street fair!  But I'll be back to my normal no weekend working week, so make sure to check back!  I decided to start off with my Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies.  Then Gluten Free Graham Crackers.  The combination of which will be the base to what I'll be making after which is Gluten Free S'mores cookies!  So enjoy you week and make sure to check back because I have lots of people who can tell you that you do not want to miss my recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies...so unbelievably better then any box mix you'll buy!

Welcome!

I have had the most wildly different aspirations for my life and my career.  From curator of a major metropolitan museum, to painter, to marine biologist I changed my mind almost every week.  One thing I always loved was baking.  Throughout college I'd bake for parties and my friends would tell me that I should start my own bakery.  I'd modestly laugh it off...baking was just a hobby...something I enjoyed.  And over the past two years I started thinking to myself why should baking just be a hobby?  So after graduating college I landed a job at Cookie Girl Bake Shop where I honed my baking skills and also learned to decorate specialty sugar cookies and cakes.  While all of this was happening, I was advised to go gluten free because I have a medical condition called fibromyalgia. So now the question is how could I keep baking if I couldn't eat anything I made?  That's when I began researching and discovering all the ways I could make gluten free desserts that taste just as great (if not better) than those with gluten.  One of the things that has always driven me towards baking is that desserts are always a positive thing.  No matter how bad of a day I'm having, I can have a chocolate chip cookie and all my troubles melt away if only for that one moment.  So now I'm out on a mission to develop recipes, further learn to decorate, and turn baking into a career.

On this blog, you can expect to find recipes I try and even some I've developed myself.  I'll also be posting photos of my decorating from work and home.  I'll post reviews of new products I try on my journey to develop the best gluten free versions of desserts.