"Poseidon's Cookies" Large Sand Dollar Silicone Mold Tutorial

Here is the last in the series of tutorials from Joanne - What fun it has been seeing her ideas and concpets come to life using our products - So as I prepare for the "blizzard of the century", I thought how nice - something to make us look forward to spring and summer -- Hope you enjoy!

Melissa

This is the Third Part of the Beach Molds Tutorial. I will be using the Large Sand Dollar Silicone Mold and talk about conceptualizing designs for cookies , executing and presenting the design.

A simple cookie can be turned into an elegant and upscale cookie once they are properly decorated. It is never an easy task to design a cookie, imagining can be sometimes stressful. Sketching your ideas help, adding color to your sketches helps some more, but laying out a design on a cookie photo helps a bit further and makes your design idea realistic before tackling the whole project of decorating an entire batch of cookies.

Materials and Tools :

Large Sand Dollar Mold

Fondant

shortening

Luster Dust

Gold Dust

Pearl Dust

Paint Brush , Soft hair , flat or filbert (at least 2)

Small amount of vodka

rolling pin

Plastic pastry scraper or small metal spatula

Cookie Cookbook with large photos ( I like Martha Stewart Cookie Book)

First, look for a good cookie photo from the pages of a cookie book or magazines, this will also help you in imagining if the embellishments, edible paints and luster colors to match a sugar cookie or a chocolate cookie. It is best to find a photo with the same size of your actual mold, if you don’t have an exact size of photo for the mold, you can photocopy, reduce or increase size.

To make the fondant sand dollar, knead a good amount of your fondant and roll it into a ball. Rub a small amount of shortening in the cavity of the mold and lay the ball on the center of the cavity of the mold, press it flat and firm, and with a rolling pin, roll out the fondant to fill out the entire cavity.

Trim excess fondant using the metal spatula or plastic scraper. Let the rolling pin smoothen out the trims. Gently unmold by releasing sides and let the mold face with cavity side down, bending the mold slightly until the molded fondant drops on the mat or just simply unmold it in the palm of your hands. This will be your sample to play around with.

Place the sample fondant sand dollar on top of the cookie photo, from there, you can start applying colors using golds and luster dust. Start blending colors on the center impression on the sand dollar (flower). Once the flower has popped out , you can start gilding the sand dollar with gold or simply brush the whole area with pearl dust, embellishing in any way you want. Once you achieved the desired effect, you can start cutting out and baking your cookies.

Tip: use a cookie cutter which has the same size as that of the actual size of the sand dollar. The cookies will expand during baking process.

Cool the cookies before decorating them.

At this point when you are waiting for your cookies to cool, you can make more fondant sand dollars equivalent (or more) to decorate the amount of cookies you are making. Dry the molded fondant sand dollar on a cookie sheet lined with paper towel or tuff board and insert a folded sheet of tissue paper under, around 3inx3in to help shape the sand dollar on a concave manner as it dries.

While the sand dollars are resting on the cookie sheet, you can start embellishing it. It is best to embellish a batch of fondant sand dollars in an assembly manner, it can save you time, but you can also embellish it one at a time if you wanted each sand dollar to look unique from each other.

Adhere the fondant sand dollar on the cookie by using a clear piping gel or corn syrup. Let the decorated cookies rest overnight in a linen box lined with paper towel or parchment paper before serving or packaging them…

When serving to your guests, I find it attractive for the cookies to be plated on a bed of brown sugar to capture the feel of the beach...

Or when the cookies are to be given as gifts, it will look elegant if packaged in a box lined with shredded parchment paper, I prefer using the kraft parchment as it has a natural brown color to match the tropical feel of the cookies.

It was truly a wonderful and enjoying experience doing a series of tutorial here at DTC. I hope to contribute more projects and ideas in the near future. If you have any question, feel free to contact me via Decorate The Cake or email me at mailto:thelittlecakedecrator@thelittlecakepatch.com. At the same time I would like to invite you to visit my website at http://www.thelittlecakepatch.com/.

Happy Cake Decorating!

Joanne

Poseidon's Cookies