A little baking...

I mentioned last week how I got the 'Biscuiteers book of iced biscuits' for Christmas and that me and my sister had a quick go at baking and icing some biscuits over the New Year... well here are the results!

Unfortunately we didn't have many icing materials between us - only one squeezy bottle and one writing nozzle! We did have some disposable piping bags though (which we had to use without nozzles) but the effect wasn't quite as good as the holes we cut were a little too big. We were also limited on colours, having only basic yellow and red food colouring to hand, so they ended up looking quite pastel but in a way I quite like that! Would have made a lovely new born baby collection :)

Because of the lack of colours we had available, we chose to do simple shapes such as cupcakes, ducks and bunnies which we thought would suit the soft muted colourings and I'm really pleased with the different shapes we created.

We started off by making a simple gingerbread mixture, then drew some templates by hand of the outline shapes we wanted onto cardboard. After placing the templates on to the rolled out dough, we cut around them with a sharp knife, and put them in the oven to bake. Then it was time to start mixing up the icing.

First we made the piping icing which is reasonably thick (about same consistency as toothpaste so that it holds it's shape), added the food colouring and distributed it in to 3 different piping bags  - one for each colour, pink, yellow and white.

With the remaining mixture we added a little water to make the consistency runnier to make our 'flood icing', again separating it in to three portions and adding the colouring. 

We then began to pipe carefully around the outside of each biscuit shape, creating little 'piped walls' as it were. When these were dry, we decanted some of the runnier flood icing into a squeezy bottle and literally 'painted in' the middle of the biscuits in our chosen colours.

We had to do each colour one at a time, because we only had the one bottle... we could have saved so much time if we had had a couple more but we were too impatient to wait until we could get some!

Once the flooding icing had dried too, we went back over, adding in the details and lines with the piping bag colours. For some reason, we outlined some of the shapes again, but I think in hindsight this was a mistake as they looked better before, but anyway, that is a lesson learnt for next time!

I can't wait to get some more equipment (nozzles/bottles) so I can try out some more designs. I'm such a perfectionist that some of this batch didn't quite meet my exacting standards but they tasted nice and I'm sure with practise I can perfect my technique! Look out for more baking experimentation coming soon:) xxx