First, to encourage you, I want you to take a look!
Looks amazing, right? Can you believe, that its quite simple, and you will need probably only 2 or 3 days of practice? Sometimes, if you have talent, it may take less! I will show you short tutorial, the rest is your willingness to do it and a bit of practice.
Decorating honey-cake is a part of polish tradition (yes, im from Poland). It is my mother's new hobby, and she is soooo good in it, that I decided to take some pictures and share it with steemit community! It took her about 3 days to decorate cookie really well, before that she was even crying, because first attempts were really tough for her..
Ok, so I will try to explain you as good as I can how to do it! If you try a little, you may have a chance to have decorations for years. You can hang them wherever you want or give them to frinds or sell them, like my mother did. She made pretty good money too!
Let's start!
Here is receipe for honey-cake, in polish called "piernik":
1/4 of glass of honey
80 grams of butter
1/2 of glass of brown sugar or powdered sugar
1 egg
1 and 1/4 of glass of wheat flour
1 tsp of baking soda
1.5-2 tblsp of a gingerbread or root spice (mine contains mostly cocoa powder, 8% grounded cinnamon, 4% grounded coriander, 3% grounded cloves)
1 tsp of cocoa powder (optionally, to make cookies darker)
Heat up honey, butter and sugar in a pan and mix it together untill sugar melts down, then cool it down. Add rest of ingrediends and mix it. If the dough is too fragile, add more honey until you get right consistencty. If dough is too soft, cool it down, it will be easier to roll it.
Roll the dough to 2-3 mm thickness, lightly sprinkling with flour to avoid sticking. Thicker cookies will be more soft after baking. Cut the right shape of your cookies like hearts, stars etc.If you want to hang it later on christmas tree, dont forget to make hole before baking! You can use a straw.
Set cookies on baking paper.
Bake cookies for 8-10 min at the temperature of 170-180 C. Don't keep them longer in the oven, bacause they may become bitter and too crispy. Cool them down before you pour icing.
Now its time to make icing! It shouldn't be too watery, because we do not want it to spill all over the cookies.
Try this proportions:
200 grams of powdered sugar
5-6 tblsp of water
Add water to the sugar really slowly and keep mixing all the time, till the consistency is right.
Then, if you want your cookies to be colorful, put some food coloring in!
Next take some ziplocks or similar plastic bags, cut just 1-2 mm of the corner, pour icing inside and try to make a line on a piece of paper. Honestly, it depends of how thick line you want.
This is how tools, that we used, look like:
You can see plastic bags with coloured icing, that we used to make thin lines and this strange-looking containers with icing too, that we used to fill the shapes drawn (we used edible food marker) on cookies.
To make our honey-cake, we used heart-shaped forms.
Now I want to show you how to make decorated heart with roses inside! It is not so tough!
- Prepare food marker, needle and icing for filling.
- Take form, put it on a cake and outline it.
- Fill it with icing.
- Use a thick needle to shape it and fill all holes. Our heart mus be perfectly flat, without any bubbles.
- After that pour a little bit of red icing, before white one gets hard. You must be fast! Than use a needle to spread it gently and form a "rose" using needle.
- Use light and/or dark green icing to make leaves. We put dark one on a top of light green. Form them with needle.
- Let it dry and enjoy your amazing decorated cookie! You can still make some more decorations, but remember, if you want to put some layers of icing on your cookie, first layer must be always dry, if you dont want them to mix together.
If you are worried, that you won't do it, look at my mother's first attempts:
But after 3 days and about 20 cookies later...
I hope you liked it and you will try it! Good luck!