Inspiration Challenge:January {New Year, New You}

Happy New Year! To kick off 2013 Stephanie from Ellie’s Bites Decorated Cookies and I are doing another inspiration challenge. This month’s theme is “New Year, New You”. We challenged ourselves to try a new decorating technique and we are encouraging you to do the same. Step outside of your comfort zone and try something new.

My new “technique” is not really a technique but more of a medium. I chose to try my hand at glaze. I won’t lie and say that I have never tried glaze before because I did work with it once in a decorating class I took. The instructor made the glaze and it was in bottles. I nearly broke my hand trying to get the glaze out of the bottles. It was so thick and extremely hard to work with. When I left the class I knew that I would never ever work with glaze. I hated it and I was sticking to royal icing. You see I love royal icing. A lot of people complain that royal doesn’t taste good and that it is rock hard. I don’t feel that way at all. I flavor my royal icing well and everyone I know tells me it tastes great. I’ve also had people tell me that it’s not as hard as others they have tried. I believe the key to it not being hard is to immediately cover your cookies as each step dries. I never leave my cookies out all the time. They get covered throughout the decorating process and I believe this helps holds moisture in.

This time around I was in control of my glaze experience because I made it myself and decided what consistency I thought I could work best with. I used Cookie Crazie Pam’s recipe which you can find here. The only change I made was to flavor it with lemon which is my go to flavoring. I decided to keep my designs simplistic since the consistency of glaze is so foreign to me. I chose to do a Valentine’s inspired design since that’s the next holiday coming up. A design in honor of the love of my life. My husband doesn’t like to take many pics so this one is about eight years old. It’s one of my favorites from when we were a lot skinnier. Lol!

Next, I flooded my cookies and allowed them to dry. I’m used to royal having a bit of a sheen but mostly drying dull so it was hard for me to tell if my cookies were dry because the glaze is so shiny. By the way I flooded with the same consistency as the outline.