Here are the cookies I mentioned a few posts ago: my Valentine's Day cookies for my mom. She loves Paris, has studied French for 12 years now, and visits France every chance she gets. My sister lives in France, so it makes travel easier. My mom has cute little Paris dessert plates, and since I knew she wanted to throw a little pink, white, and black Paris party for her girlfriends, I got inspired to design a whole set of cookies for her. I used scroll fonts, purchased some vector clipart, made cute backgrounds in pink stripes, polka dots, damasks, etc. I used several different cutters to make the various shapes and sizes, and I dare say they turned out gorgeous. My mom was blissful, so job well done!
I used LilaLoa's Chocolate Cookie Recipe—a fabulous recipe, which doesn't spread and tastes like brownies! I added a bit of black food color to the recipe to make a deep, dark brown.
As you see here, the best thing about making cookies with wafer papers is that you don't have to be neat with your piping—the border will cover a multitude of sins. Pipe with thick icing, flood with thinner icing. See the Royal Icing, Step by Step post for details.
Once the icing is rock hard (roughly 24h; 6 if you're using a Dehydrator), grab some clear syrup (e.g. Karo Light Corn Syrup) and glue away with a craft brush, just as you would if you were decoupaging or scrapbooking. Stick on and let dry. Revisit the edges in about 15 minutes and tamp down again.
At this point, I realized the cookies would have been really cute without a border, too. But, I had been sloppy with the edges, thinking I was going to put on a border. Next time, I will take care to ice and flood neatly and leave the cookies borderless, since they were so pretty just plain! (And think of the time saved piping borders with devilishly stiff icing, with carpal-ridden hands!)
I couldn't decide if I should make a white border or a black border, so, since I had 2 of each wafer paper image, I decided to do half one way, half the other. Piped with super-stiff icing, #16 star tip.
Which one do you prefer? The white-bordered ones are young and sweet and cutesy; the black-bordered ones are more boudoir-va-va-voom. I 'm still not sure which one I liked better—I think the mix of both made for a really lovely combo.
Here is a list of the cutters I used—you could, of course, cut them out by hand, but who has the patience for that?!
They took a long time, but my mom's party will go down in history, my mom is over the moon, and moms are worth it, after all :) If you want to take a crack at these, the wafer papers are available
at my shop.
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Anniina is a cookie decorating hobbyist and mom of a toddler.
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