Under the Sea

Hello everyone! Welcome back or welcome to another blog post in my series of sugar cookies and royal icing. Last week I created crowns that were inspired by Walt Disney’s classic film Sleeping Beauty. This week is slightly similar in the sense of inspiration. If you read the title you may have already made an educated guess on this weeks theme, The Little Mermaid! If you are not familiar with the movie The Little Mermaid, the plot is based around a mermaid named Ariel making a deal with a wicked sea witch named Ursula. In the deal, Ursula makes Ariel human but takes away the power of Ariels voice so that she is no longer able to speak or sing. In the time that she is human (three days) Ariel must make Prince Eric fall in love with her. Now, I am not mermaid shaped cookies, or sea witches, but I am making something deeply inspired by the film and its setting: seashells!

Using the same sugar cookie recipe as my prior weeks, as well as using my trusted royal icing recipe, I felt as though I was set for success. Lately I have been feeling a little bit beat by my own learning project. Rather than my cookies and designs becoming progressively better, they were becoming all on the same level of satisfactory and I felt as though my improvements were becoming slim to none. This week I knew that I needed to step up my creations and have faith in each process. I worked slowly and thoroughly through each process, adding extra icing sugar to my royal icing batch to make it thicker and easier to lead, and then creating a new batch of icing and converting it to make it thick and non-flooding. If you read my learning project blog post from week three titled Welcome to Cloud 9 you may remember that I did a layer of flooded icing and then a thick layer of puffed icing. That is exactly what I wanted to do again this week with the slight change of using two colours instead of one, adding edible pearls, and using a more advanced design. The seashells have been my hardest design yet as they have more ridges, smaller crevices, and then a sharper shape at the bottom. I made sure that my icing would be extra thick for this batch and was ready to create my product.

On Monday night I baked the cookies, let them sit in the refrigerator for an hour while I took my puppy Scarlett out for a walk, came back and cut the cookies, let them bake in the oven, went to another class as they cooled, and after class I added my base layer of icing. After my base layer was complete I left them it on a cookie case overnight to ensure they were completely hardened, and then added the ridges and the pearl to each individual cookie once I woke up in the morning. Once I completed the cookies and the ridges were hardened, I stood back and for the first week since week number three I was truly proud of my creation. This week I also created my first ever Instagram reel! I am proud with how it turned out and I hope all of you will give it a watch as well since I spent more time than I am willing to admit on it! I added music, different processes, and the final product in the reel, please let me know what you think of the reel in the comments below!

Once again, I took the cookies to the staff at work and was greeted to some lovely comments written on the white board in the staff room about my cookies. I have found a new love for my learning project and I hope that that reflects in my final project for this week! For weekly updates on my learning projects, educational recommendations, and more follow my Twitter! I hope you all come back to read next weeks blog post, stay safe and healthy everyone!