Doctor Who Cookies

I am a huge fan of anything scifi/fantasy...so it's pretty much a given that I'm a huge Doctor Who fan.  I posted this photo a few months ago in a post about a few events I did.  I did these for fun do I didn't really do a tutorial but I did do vine's for them!  So I figured I would post my vine's which while not the same as a tutorial, do show my decorating process and give a little bit of an explanation on how planning and executing more complicated cookies works.

Summer Fun Cookies Decorating Tutorial

I love making decorative cookies that are bright and fun, and summer is the perfect time to make them!  If you remember my ocean cookies you may remember the starfish, sailboats, and seashells, but this time I wanted to amp up the color even more.  What more perfect cookies to do to celebrate summer than brightly colored beach themed cookies?

Summer Beach Cookies

Decorating level: Easy-Medium
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Sugar Dough Recipe or my gluten free chocolate sugar dough
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" round cookie cutter, starfish cutter, sailboat cutter, and seashell cutter
• 6 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Three-Six #2 round tips
• Three #3 round tips
• Food Safe Markers
• Toothpicks
• Gel food coloring:
• Lemon Yellow
• Sky Blue
• Deep Pink or Soft Pink with a drop of Fuschia

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

Cake Pops

I wouldn't necessarily call cake pops the new cupcake, but their trend definitely is going around.  Personally, I find them a little too time consuming to be worth the effort.  I am a cookie person though and if I'm going to spend my time on decorating I'd rather decorate cookies!  However, I had some leftover cake from an event and I didn't know what to do with it...and then the idea struck me to finally try to make cake pops!  I didn't want to do any crazy decorating, just something bright and cute and perfect for spring but that had great flavor.  The leftover cake I had was my Honey, Lavender, & Lemon Cake and a plain yellow cake, and I thought it would be nice to do a Lemon Cream Cheese Icing since I also had leftover lemon curd.  For me cake pops are the perfect way to re-purpose left over ingredients in a new, bright, fun form! The result was sweet and floral cake with a bit of tang from the cream cheese and lemon.  Between the flavor and the bright colors they were the perfect spring treat!

Below I have the recipe I used for the Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting and a link to the cake recipe I used...but this post is really a template to do any flavor you'd like!  All you need is cake and icing essentially and just follow the instructions below!  Like I said before, the perfect thing to do if you have any leftovers!  Especially if you were carving or leveling or forming cakes...don't waste all those little pieces!  Turn them into cake pops!

Cake Pops

Recipe for Lemon Cream Cheese Icing adapted from The Hobby Rome Diaries
Makes about 3 dozen cake pops
Print Recipe

Ingredients for Lemon Cream Cheese Icing

- 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
- 8 oz cream cheese

- 1/3 cup of lemon curd

- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

- 1/2 sheet cake.  I used my Honey, Lavender, & Lemon cake.

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! 

Snowmen Decorations

Winter cookies are some of my favourite to create.  This year I wanted to do a cookie that would be good for all my friends and family that was just winter themed instead of holiday themed.  I decided I wanted to a scene with snow falling and a snowman, instead of just doing snowman shaped cookies.  I also wanted them to be able to be used as decorating for your home or if you celebrate Christmas for you tree so when I baked them I cut out a little hole in the top to place ribbon in later.  These vibrant, cheery, snowmen will be sure to brighten up their recipient's day!

Snowmen Decorations

Decorating level: Medium-Advanced
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Chocolate Sugar Dough Recipe
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" Circle Cutter
• 9 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Two #3 round tips
• Two #2 round tips
• Five #1 round tips 
• Toothpicks 
• White or Opal sanding sugar
• Gel food coloring:
• Sky Blue
• Royal Blue
• Fushia
• Regal Purple
• Orange
• Chocolate Brown
• Black

Baby Cookie Tutorials: Onesies and Teddy Bears

I recently welcomed a new baby cousin into my family. As you can tell by the cookies his name is Zackery.  I wanted to make onesie and teddy bears to celebrate.  I've done tons of onesies while I was decorating for a living, and I wanted to do something different.  I once did a baby shower order that was jungle themed with monkeys and lions and elephants and I thought it would be really cute to do those images but on the onesies.  The great thing about this design is you can alter them and do any decoration you want on the onesie.  You can go to my flickr and see some variations on baby cookies like punk rock baby cookies or jungle baby shower, .  Also, you can do variations on the bears.  Last year for the holidays I made them into polar bears with scarves!

Safari Onesies and Teddy Bears

Decorating level: Medium
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Chocolate Sugar Dough Recipe
• Royal Icing Recipe
• Onesie and Teddy Bear cutters
• 6 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Three #3 round tips
• Three #2 round tips
• Three #1 round tips 
• Toothpicks
• Gel food coloring:
• Lemon Yellow
• Sky Blue
• Orange

Sugar Skull Owls for Halloween

This year for Halloween I wanted to do a cookie that was a little less traditional.  I've done skulls and spiders and mummies and things like that in the past.  At first I wanted to do a whole bunch of decorative owls, almost look like they were made of cut paper possibly in Halloween colors like oranges and purples.  Then I really wanted to do sugar skulls, but I feel like everybody is doing sugar skulls now.  Then the thought came to me to do a very decorative sugar skull inspired owl design.  I used a chocolate sugar cookie base to really make the design pop on the cookie and I couldn't be happier with the results.  They're something a little different than what I normally see for Halloween cookies and that's exactly what I was going for.  And like always, they're gluten free.  If you want to make these too, here's what you're going to need.

Sugar Skull Owls for Halloween

Decorating level: Advanced
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Chocolate Sugar Dough Recipe
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" round cookie cutter
• 12 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Two #3 round tips
• Nine #2 round tips
• Two #1 round tips 
• Toothpicks
• Gel food coloring:
• Regal purple (or Violet with a dash of Fushia)
• Lemon Yellow
• Leaf or Neon Green
• Sky Blue
• Deep Pink
• Orange

Go-To Chocolate Sugar Cookies

Right now I'm working on two decorating projects that I plan to also do tutorials for.  Both designs involve lightly colored icing or white icing for the base color.  I really want these designs to pop though, and those colors can sometimes look bland on a regular sugar cookie.  So I really wanted to find the perfect chocolate sugar dough recipe to give these cookies some contrast.  After looking at at least a dozen recipes, I decided this recipe by Georganne at LilaLoa appealed to me the most.  Nice crisp shapes, and tons of raving reviews about how delicious they are. 

So I converted it to be gluten free and I was not disappointed!  Great, rich chocolate flavor and with the help of just three-four drops of black dye the perfect contrast color I was looking for (don't worry! that little dye does not give it a bitter taste).  They roll out great and they hold their shape perfectly.  They seem like the perfect ground for decorating, and they're also great plain or just sprinkled with a little bit of sugar.  So if you don't want to go all out with royal icing decorating, even using a cute cutter and just sanding them with sugar will make a delicious treat.

This will be your go-to chocolate sugar dough.  And I dare you to not sneak any bites of this raw!  That is just how delicious it is.

As with most sugar dough, you need to let this dough rest.  When you're done mixing it will be very sticky and soft.  Georganne suggests if you need to use it right away add 1/2 cup more flour.  While I did not try this, if you need to go with more brown rice or sorghum flour.  I did not try this with gluten free flours though so it may not work the same as with wheat flour.  If you try the extra flour and it works let me know!  Otherwise just a few hours in the fridge will make it the perfect texture for rolling out without any problems with it being too soft or stick

Chocolate Sugar Cookies

Recipe adapted from LilaLoa
Makes about 1 1/2 dozen 4" cookies
Print Recipe

Ingredients

- 1 1/4 cup unsalted butter
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla, gluten free
- 1 tsp salt
- 3/4 tsp baking powder, gluten free
- 2/3 cup non dutch-processed cocoa, I used Hershey's
- 1 cup brown rice flour
- 1 cup sorghum flour
- 2/3 cup tapioca flour
- 1/3 cup white rice flour
- 3/4 tsp xanthan gum
- Black gel dye, optional

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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Decorating Tutorial: Tutus and Flowers

For my little cousin Samantha's 3rd birthday, I wanted to make Tutu cookies for her because she loves ballet.  When I cut and baked all the tutus I needed I still had a lot of extra dough, so I cut the rest into flowers.  Now, I was limited for time, so these are not gluten free, but I'm sure you could find plenty of recipes for gluten free dough on the web.  I haven't perfected it yet with my own flour, but at work we just substitute Bob's All Purpose Gluten Free Flour in our regular recipe and it works great!

But back to the point, this is Jesicakes first decorating tutorial!!  I'll show you how to make these flowers and those tutus.  And the great thing about decorating, is once you learn principles like layering, you can apply them to make any cookie you want.

Royal Icing

Recipe by Martha Stewart

Ingredients

- 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- 5 Tbsp meringue powder or 2 large egg whites
- 1/2 cup of room temperature water
- 1-2 tsp lemon juice

In the bowl of a mixer with a paddle attachment.

Add the water and lemon juice and using the paddle mix the water in enough so it is mostly saturated.

Turn on the mixer on low until it is fully saturated.  Then turn the mixer to medium high and beat for about 8 minutes.  The icing should hold it's peaks when you turn off the mixer and raise the paddle.

I find it easier to thin icing than to thicken it, so I'd make the base batch thick.

Transfer to a sealed plastic container to keep the icing in while mixing the colors.  The icing will dry out and harden if you leave it exposed.
 

Icings Colors and Decorating

-Pink Gel Food Dye

-Yellow Gel Food Dye

-3 #2 round tips

-1 #13 star tip

-4 couplers and 4 coupler rings

-4 pastry bags

-Loose Icings: Light Pink, Dark Pink-Thick Icings: Dark Pink, White, Yellow
-Opal or White sanding sugar and a paper plate (optional)