Lace Evolution

I made these star cake cookies for a certain someone's birthday recently.  I asked for her favorite colors (lime green and navy blue) and decorated the cakes accordingly.  I'd seen this idea on one of my favorite cookier blogs, but once I was finished frosting the cookies with the lime green bunting and navy blue back ground, I was bored.  There was nothing interesting about the cookies to draw the eye.  I was frustrated the the cookies on the blog looked so amazing and mine looked blah.  So I took some of the white icing I had leftover and started making "lace" patterns like I had seen on another cookie blog.

Now I say "lace" in quotations because to me this isn't lace, this is a pretty pattern, but the lady on the blog called it lace.  Even if it wasn't an exact replica of lace I still think it achieved what I was going for, which was to brighten up the cookies. 

Now for Easter.  I wanted to make some cookies for certain people at Easter just as a special way to say "Happy Easter!" The problem was I tried a lot of different things with this set of cookies.  I tried a new glaze under the frosting and a few other designs and it was just too much and I didn't have a clear plan.  Cookies take TIME.  You have to make the dough, bake the cookies, let the cookies cool for at least a day so oil won't leach into the frosting, make the frosting, decorate the first layer, let that dry overnight, add the final frosting details and let them dry for a few hours before packaging.  The whole process takes about three days when you have a plan, but with no plan it took close to a week and a half from the time the cookies were baked to when I was ready to ship them and then there would be about a week of shipping and handling so I just couldn't send them.  They would have been stale.  So we got to eat them all :)  

I have a confession to make, I can do things as long as I have an example to follow.  I learned calculus and fluids and physics by using the solutions manual and the problems as example problems.  Let me tell you there are NO examples for this kind of "lace" pattern on the internet.  I spent weeks searching for "lace edges," "lace details," "lace clip art" and all I ended up with was a few decent patterns and some rather risque photos of people in lingerie!

 So I went with the moto "you can never have too many half circles" and just had fun.

I really liked how they turned our in the end!

The purple cookie on the right was an interesting experiment.  I've seen a blog where the cookier makes a net pattern and then fills in the squares like it's cross-stitch.  I tried this technique but I didn't have a small enough frosting tip :(  No worries, I ordered one recently!

I think my favorite design was the pink cookie on the right.  It was just swirly and symmetrical and pretty :)

I also had some smaller circle cookies decorated that I took to my office.  I couldn't bring the egg shaped ones since it was a week after Easter and I didn't want people in the office thinking I had brought them super stale Easter reject cookies!

More half circling.  Btw, it is ridiculously hard to pipe a perfect circle of frosting on a cookie.

And here is my favorite pink design only this time in blue!

Speaking of needing a smaller tip, here are the frosting tips I use.  The tip on the far right is a #2 tip.  This is the most ubiquitous frosting tip out there.  I use it for almost everything.  I outline every cookie I decorate with this tip.  It is also the tip I used to make the "lace" on the cake cookies.  The next tip down the line is a #1 tip.  This is the smallest tip Michaels sells so it's the next tip I got.  This is the tip I used to make the Easter "lace"cookies.  Now the two tips on the left are my new tips that I'm really excited to use!  I have cookie dough in the fridge just waiting to be a vessel for my frosting experiments!

This is a top view of the tips.  The tips on the right are the ones I normally use, the ones on the left are the new ones.  Those things are TINY!  I've been told that people strain their frosting through clean nylon stockings before they pipe it so it doesn't clog the tips!   Well I can promise that I won't squeeze any frosting through stockings but wish me luck in avoiding clumps!