Saturday, July 16, 2011

Daisies For A Celebration of Life / Tutorial

This is a simple cookie that I'm providing a tutorial for those that are interested or new to cookie decorating.

A friend of mine recently lost his mom. He was hosting a Celebration of Life, so I made these Daisy cookies for the event. I made 7 batches of cookie dough which I figured should yield a minimum of 105 cookies. I let the dough set in the refrigerator overnight as I prefer to not have to add flour to gooey cookie dough since it changes the taste of the cookies. The next day I rolled all the cookies. The cookies are so large that I ended up with 101 cookies - no chance for any mistakes...

After the LiveStrong Challenge, I started outlining the daisy cookies so that I could ice them the next day. I knew that to keep the colors from bleeding, I needed to outline them and let them sit overnight before icing the bottom layer. Here is a picture of the "naked" cookie. 
 To draw the circle in the middle of the flower, I decided that I was too tired (after just riding 106+ miles) to see straight and get a perfect circle, so I drew around one of my small circle cookie cutters and I projected the image onto the cookie using my KopyKake Projector so that I could ice a perfect circle. I did this on all 101 cookies.
 So as you can see from the image below, I outlined the daisy and also outlined the center of the flower.
 The next day I filled the bottom coat of all the daisies with pink & lavender icing. I made sure to spread the icing out to each corner of the daisy so there weren't any air bubbles.
 The next day I filled the center of each flower with yellow icing and then topped each of those with yellow sanding sugar. 
 Directly after filling the centers and the sanding sugar on all the cookies, I then added these detail dots of yellow icing around the center of each flower. 
 Directly after that, I added detail to each of the petals. I started the first one with yellow details on the petal, but decided that I didn't like that so I scraped it off and used the same color as the petal.
 And here they are done. My friend came and brought a beautiful photo of his mother with a poem on the back and we tied a coordinating ribbon to attach the photo to each cookie. I wish I had taken a photo of that. They came out really nice.
As you can see, decorating Daisies is pretty simple. Decorating 101 of them with 2 days out of town in between was the only difficult part. 

I have a long list of ideas of what I want to bake next. I finally wrote them all down so my head isn't so full all the time! I haven't decided what's next just yet as there are so many. My little 9-year old friend just had a birthday and I want to make cookies with her and I'd like to make cookies for my top LiveStrong supporters and I have a bunch of new cookie cutters that I'm dying to play with! So much fun to have!

I hope you're all baking something yummy!

5 comments:

  1. What darling cookies! I'm believing that there was a lot of pride and joy that went into these because you wanted to make them so special for this occassion. Thanks for the tutorial. As always, you inspire others.

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  2. I'm sorry that your friend lost his Mom to cancer. He is blessed to have such a beautiful friend in you. To make and decorate so many cookies and then to package them with his Mom's photo was such a wonderful gift from your heart.

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  3. @The Vanilla Bean Baker Thank you so much for your kind comments Paula! You're always such a sweetie! My friend's mom didn't have Cancer though. Thankfully she passed away from a very full, long-lived life :-) I think she was 92. Paula are you on Facebook? I couldn't find you or your cookies... we are destined to be facebook friends you know!

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