Creative Cutters

Yeah, yeah. I know you haven't seen me here in a while. Sorry about that. Will you forgive me if I give you a cookie? I thought so!

Samantha at Flour-De-Lis and a few of her talented cookie-making friends are having a Creative Cutters contest. The objective is to use a baseball glove cookie cutter to create a cookie that isn't a baseball glove. Sounds fun, right?

 

I didn't have the cookie cutter, so I printed a picture of it, cut it out, and traced it onto a piece of paper a few times. Then I started sketching. This is what I came up with. I was inspired by traditional American Indian princess tattoos. I had no idea if it would actually work as a cookie, but I had nothing to lose.

Once the (hand-cut!) cookies were baked, I traced the basic outlines of my sketch onto tracing paper and transferred it to my cookie using a needle to gently carve around the edge of my template. The inside lines were then poked through the template onto the cookie.

Time to outline! This was done with my usual vegan royal icing and a number 2 tip.

I was excited to try to make the feathered headdress look feathery, but I didn't take the time to thin my white icing. Big mistake. At least I learned that wet-on-wet doesn't work when the icing dries really fast. Bummer.

I filled the other sections with my chosen colors, and ended up denting the blue and the skin color because I wasn't being careful. Luckily both dents were in areas that were going to be covered once the details were added. I let this dry for almost a full 24 hours.

The next evening, I was ready to add the details. I traced her face onto the paper template from the day before, poking needle holes in the lines as a guide, and transferring the pokes to the cookie. Then I made the black icing. I spent a good 30 minutes getting it to a good piping consistency. I wanted her face to look amazing! I practiced piping on a piece of tracing paper placed over my drawing. Once I was happy with the way it looked, I moved on to the cookie. This was done with a number 1 tip.

More linework, freehanded based on my drawing.

Finally, I filled the braid and headpiece, and piped her lips.

My original drawing included red shading across her nose and cheeks because I saw that in a lot of the tattoos I used as reference. I was too lazy to go to the store to get red luster dust, but I'm still pretty happy with the way she looks.

What do you think? Would you do anything differently? I'm still new to the cookie world, so any advice is appreciated. Hopefully I'll win the Creative Cutters contest and have more cookie cutters and goodies to practice with. I can't wait to see the other entries!