Heidi's Mix: Cookie Decorating Tip: Draw An Outline

Using a food-safe pen, I drew an outline of the bee onto these apple cookies before adding the royal icing. Having and outline to follow makes decorating so much easier.

Food Safe Pens are so helpful in cookie decorating. They can be used to add detail to small areas in lieu of royal icing, but I what I find myself using them most frequently for is drawing outlines of designs.

Drawing an outline to follow before adding the royal icing helps keep my stress level down and my designs much more consistent.

Practice drawing your design onto paper first to get the scale and look just right. If the design is intricate, you might want to actually cut a template that you can trace onto your cookies.

For the bee design on these apple cookies, the design was simple enough that I felt comfortable drawing it free hand.

It is essential that your base coat of royal icing be completely dry before drawing onto the cookie. You must be patient and not rush this step or believe me, you will be frustrated when your food safe pen breaks into the base coat.

It took 12 hours for the green base coat of icing to dry completely. Drying time varies. It depends on the humidity and the amount of royal icing needed to fill the cookie. The bigger the cookie, the longer the drying time.

Here's how I made these custom Apple And Bee cookies for the summer gathering of a family whose last name is Appleby (get it?):

I outlined the apple cookies with medium consistency royal icing and a #2 tip.

After letting the outline dry for about 30 minutes, I filled the cookies with flood consistency royal icing and a #3 tip. I used the larger tip because the cookies are big and there was a lot of area to cover.

I used a scribe to evenly distribute the icing and then gave the cookie a gentle shake to help the icing settle.

After filling all of the cookies, I waited for them to completely dry before moving onto the next step. This took 12 hours.

I used a black food safe pen to draw an outline of the bee. The design was simple enough for me to do this free hand but if you are uncomfortable doing this, you can make a paper template to trace.

I added the outline to all of the cookies.

Using medium consistency black royal icing and a #1 tip, I traced and filled the head of the bee.

Using the same icing and #1 tip I traced the body and added two lines across it. I then used my scribe tool to ease the bottom of the body into a point. If you don't have a scribe tool, a skewer or toothpick would also work.