Distressed Ink Rainbow Leaves for Canada's 150th Birthday by Sweethart Baking Experiment

This is the logo and this years flag for Canada's 150th (taking place on July 1st). I stayed true to the original colours, but I wanted to do something fun and different. The cookie cutter I used was 3D printed and had all the lines that you see incorporated into it.

So the result is a sugar cookie with all these imprints. Normally I do a solid royal icing background on my cookies so I outlined all of the areas and flooded each one in, much like you do with quilting on a cookie. So I had a solid white background with faint impressions where the lines are supposed to be.

I painted each section with a combination of white corn syrup and gel dyes. I noticed that when I did a thinner layer, I would get random spots where it wouldn't adhere, like little bubbles. It looked neat, so I just kept doing what I was doing. Thicker layers didn't make as many bubbles. After a few hours, it was completely dry, slightly tacky. I threw them in front of a fan and blasted it on high, thinking that might make some more little white spots/bubbles. It worked. I outlined it all in white and then I let them dry in the open air over night, no fan.

Over night, the colour faded and became a lot more blotchy and the white spots/bubbles became more prominent. Definitely dig this look! It's like an alcohol ink painting with some salt thrown on. Very distressed looking. When I liked how they looked and they were dry enough, I packaged each one and heat sealed them.

EDIT: The white royal icing underneath is legit sucking up the corn syrup / dye, and the cookies have changed a lot since this morning! The colour is super light now, less blotchy, and becoming more subtle. I'm kinda sad! I'll take a photo tomorrow.

Beautiful! Interesting experiment 

Lovely effect, so pretty!

So interesting and beautiful! Would be nice to see that pic with the changes...

carouselselsel posted:

So interesting and beautiful! Would be nice to see that pic with the changes...

So, my cookies completely sucked up that lovely distressed dye that I did up, and I was left with a barely-noticeable colour pattern. I was sad, but I wasn't going to let these cookies defeat me. I decided to go with a bright and vivid stained glass effect the second time around.

I mixed up a batch of glaze (it includes corn syrup), and tinted a tiny amount of each one with gel dye and flooded the sections. The glaze doesn't set up as hard as the royal icing, but it dried super shiny and added to the stained glass look. I went back over the lines with more white royal icing, too, to finish it off. There's a lot more layers on there than I wanted, but that's what happens when you mess up the first time. There are a few spots that kinda flooded into eachother because my linework the first time around was thinner consistency so the barriers weren't high enough to contain all that glaze, but considering how pale and sad they looked after the distressed ink look got eaten by the royal icing underneath (hello - royal icing is porous, I will remember that next time), I think I saved them from certain death!

Evelindecora posted:

Beautiful! Interesting experiment 

Thanks so much! ^_^

Cookieland by ZorniZZa posted:

Lovely effect, so pretty!

Thank-you! I really loved it. I just wish I could have gotten it to STAY that way. Hahah.