Flower Power

Hello everyone! Welcome to or welcome back to my weekly learning project blog where I am able to document both the highs and the lows of decorating sugar cookies. To start off, lets recap on what cookie designs we have created so far just to remember how far we have come! From week number one to week eight I have created a circle, cacti, clouds, mermaid tails, ice-cream cones, crowns, seashells, and this week our shape is flowers! Next week will be my final week of the learning project meaning that I only have one more design to prove how far I have come when it comes to decorating and creating the perfect consistency when it comes to royal icing.

So this week did not go as I had originally hoped it would, I was so proud of my seashells from last week and was ready to get back in the kitchen to decorate my floral shaped cookies. However, that was not the case. The cookies baked perfectly as the dough was nice and soft and easy to cut and shape. They baked without any cracks on the surface and cooled overnight in my cookie tray. I knew that I wanted to take a bold approach to the cookies and create four different colours of icing so that there would be more variety. I found it especially important to change up the tone of the colours I chose so that each batch of cookies would be able to stand out from week to week rather than having a pink shade or pastel blue every single week. I made two batches of royal icing and split each batch in half to make four different bowls of icing. For the colour palette I ended up deciding on a deeper blue, orange, green, and a darker purple tone then I would usually opt for.

I started out with my base coat for each cookie where I applied a basic flooding method, and allowed them to dry for about an hour before I decided to continue the decorating process by adding some extra details and fun elements to my flowers. I found an image on Pinterest a week prior to baking my sugar cookies so that I could have an outline of what I wanted to do and what I had hoped my final project would be. I knew that I wanted to do centres that did not match the base colour as well as create a ribbon/lifted effect on the edges. I put all four colours of icing into the piping bag, turned on some YouTube videos to play in the background, and began to pipe the ribbons and centres onto my flowers.

Sadly, the final product did not turn out exactly how I wanted them to. I knew that the shapes of the flowers were different of course, but my finalized centres and some of my ribbons were not standing out the way I had hoped. If you look at the image of what I wanted them to look like you are able to see how to icing looks more puffed than flat. But my icing did not want to stay as puffed in the centre. This week I was also watching tons of compilations of cookie decorating on YouTube. I truly want cookie decorating to be something that I am able to take pride in with each and every batch I create. As well as being able to use an airbrush, stencils, brushes, stamps, etc.

My final product is not my favourite, but not my worst creation. Having this week not go as well as I had planned for, makes me want to watch even more videos on both YouTube and TikTok and practice multiple times this week so that my final product is one to remember!

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A few more of my classmates are also working on cooking/baking-related projects that you should all take some time and check out as well! Branden Smith focuses on making a new meal from scratch every week for his family members, and then each member rates the meal on a scale from one to ten! Also, Shana Blenkin focuses her blog around baking beautiful confections from bagels, buns, and even sugar cookies! I highly recommend checking out both of their blogs as I have enjoyed them each and every week. A word of caution though, they will both make you hungry!

See you all next week for the finale of sugar cookies and royal icing!