Edible Mad Hatter 3-D Hat Cookies

I fell in love with all those decorated little Mad Hatter type top hats that came out a few years ago as head bands, hair clips and even Christmas tree ornaments.

Those hats have been on my make-it-into-a-cookie list for years, and since I've taken some much needed time away from my forever ongoing home renovation I decided to see if I could translate one into a cookie. And because the design side of my brain never shuts down I couldn't stop with just one.


The upper part of the hat was easy to figure out compared to finding a way to cover the whole thing with an even coat of icing and getting the brim to have a nice flared edge on either side. I know I could have just used a flat round cookie, but my sense of design demanded that it not look like a giant push-pin.

This is my fancy Mad Hatter/St. Patrick's day hat. My very first finished 3-D cookie hat.
The embellishments are 24 karat (supposedly edible) gold brushed on molded fondant pieces.
They can be popped off before eating the cookie however.

Molded white and black fondant along with edible gold were used to make the decorative shapes.
This photo shows some of the pieces before and after painting.

This was actually my second completed hat, but the first photo I posted to other sites.
The basic composition of this top hat is the same, but instead of colored sugar all over I used a patterned sugar sheet by Wilton. Finishing the hat using this method has a lot more visual impact, but adhering the icing sheet takes more time and care.
The flowers are fondant and the heart is a made of sugar pearls and dragees.

The underside of the finished hat, brushed with icing and sprinkled with colored sugar.
Inside I just brushed on 2 coats of black icing without the added colored sugar.
All of the hats are hollow, and as long as the decorations don't extend over the top, they can be turned over and filled with candy etc. as an extra treat.

Front view of another design. The cameo broach is made of fondant, sugar pearls and dragees.

The broach and edible lace are made up ahead of time to facilitate decorating.

Close-up of the edible lace detail. I used a product called Sugar Dress to make the lace as I needed it to stay pliable.  The jeweled flower is fondant with a sugar pearl and dragee center.

Two extra designs using less rings, and shaping the top to give them their iconic cowboy look.
The accents are fondant and edible wafer paper.


As you can see, there are a variety of ways to shape and finish these hats so they can suit any number of occasions. I have other 3-D hat designs in the works including a baseball cap, graduation hat, witch's hat, and fingers crossed, a pirate hat, which is proving to be quite challenging.


♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Pirate Cookies

Pirate cookies are on the agenda today. I'm taking you back several years to revisit two pirate cookies that will now be available at Ecrandals as cutters along with a pirate hat. 

I can't tell you how exciting it is to open a box from Eric and Jamie and find my designs gleaming up at me. I stare at them and wonder how in the world I'm going to force myself to open the neatly wrapped packages and expose their bright shiny surfaces to the elements. Then reality hits me. It's because of these meticulously formed works of art that I don't have to hand cut these shapes anymore, and the packaging suddenly disappears.

The best part however is knowing that I will eventually be able to hand down these sturdy beauties to the ones that inspired them in the first place.

Here is the set all together. The Pirate girl (top) and hat (left) are the new cutters. The Pirate Boy (right) has been offered at Ecrandals for some time now.

Now for some design history.

The adorable little girl in the picture on the left is my grand daughter Annabelle at the age of 5 or 6. Way back when I was designing my Pirate Buddy cookie she asked if I could design a girl pirate for her. Since my grand kids are my biggest fans and greatest inspiration I decided to go one better and design a pirate girl using her image for the cookie right down to the freckles. I first posted the hand cut version (photo on the right) on my Flickr site in 2011.

It starts out as a line drawing that I refine in my computer's paint program.

The Pirate Girl cutter and baked cookie.

My quick way to add outline areas to decorate by cutting out pieces of the template and marking on the cookie with a food marker.

Finished cookie with a slight design variation.

A new addition to my Pirate Designs is this Pirate hat, adapted from the girl's hat with a rolled edge detail added.

The Pirate Hat cutter, and baked cookie.

The finished cookie.

I've designed them for a more girly pirate here, but this can easily be designed for a boy or girl.

The inner hat detail can also be eliminated for a larger looking hat.

And lastly my Pirate Buddy which ironically was my first pirate design.

The boy and girl pirates were originally designed and posted in 2011 hence the old watermarked date.

The Pirate Buddy cutter and baked cookie.

The finished cookie.

Finished Pirate Set

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Birthday Queen Cookies

I had the privilege to be part of a cookie exchange where each participant made cookies for another one's birthday. Well, the recipient I was assigned to was Dawn (Kneadacookie). No pressure.
NO PRESSURE!!! Yeah there was pressure!!!! Not only have I been a fan of her work since I first saw it on Cake Central back in 2007, she actually owns a bakery where she makes cookies and other bakery goods for a living.
Anyway, after months of wondering what I was going to make her, I finally got to work and
designed the following Birthday Queen themed cookies.

Royal Banner

Birthday Queen

I'm embarrassed to say I actually sent her the wrong cookie. I accidently sent a cookie that was unfinished, lacking the darker outlines for the facial features and the ribbons. I don't think I gilded the crown accents either.

I didn't notice that fact until I'd boxed them all up and sent them out. I found this cookie the following day still sitting where I had photographed it. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I finished boxing them up at 1:30 in the morning so my husband could take them to the post office.

I'm so sorry Dawn. Here is the Cookie Queen you should have gotten.

Special birthday plate cookie

Petit four cookies

Mini crown cookies

And for those of you wondering who sent me cookies. Here they are. These are cookies made for me by Pam also known as CookieCrazie, another cookie designer I have admired for years. I got to see these beauties up close and personal when I received them back in July for my birthday. What a treat! Thank you again Pam.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Rainbow Cloud Cookies - Tutorial

Danielle, one of my cookie muses, or grand children if you will, inspired these cookies. They
were made because of the candy in the photo below and her desire to eat it before I knew what I wanted to do with it. It was sitting in what we call the "don't touch Grandma's stuff" area. She told me to please hurry up and design a rainbow cloud cookie because she really needed to eat those rainbows. Okay, so I admit they've been there for over a month, waiting for a design inspiration to hit me. You hit a bullseye Danielle. You have again come up with a fun design idea for me to figure out how to make into cookie form.

Here is the rainbow candy Danielle really needed to eat. I found it at Party City. As you can see it's flexible enough to use for a rainbow.

I don't have a cloud cookie cutter, so I drew two cloud patterns with slots marked large enough for the rainbow candy to slide through. I scanned the drawing to my computer, cleaned it up in my paint program and printed it onto card stock for templates.

Using the template I cut out my clouds. I then marked where I wanted the rainbow candy to slide through and cut a slot large enough. I used a small cutter I found in a mini alphabet set (upper left cookie), but I also show how you can get the same result using a round icing tip to cut the ends (lower left cookie), and an offset spatula to cut out the middle (middle right cookie). A knife might have been better, but I had the spatula handy.

Note: If your cookie dough spreads you might need to make the hole for the candy rainbow larger and/or wider so it doesn't spread together and close up while it bakes.

Once the cookies were baked and cooled I did a wet on wet technique starting with white icing and then adding swirls of sky blue, light blue, and pink. (middle left cookie). I let this dry overnight. The next day I outlined in white icing (upper right cookie) and sprinkled white sanding sugar over the outline and let dry. (bottom right cookie).

Here they are all done with the rainbow candy threaded through the hole in the cookie. Now Danielle has a cookie to eat with her rainbow.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Princess Birthday Cookies

For my grand-daughter's 3rd birthday party I made these little star wands and number 3 cookies with crowns on them. She was having a princess party, so I tried to make princessey cookies to match the theme.

All sealed and ready to go.

To make the crown number 3s, I used a number 3 cookie cutter and cut out the 3s I needed. Then using the top part of a leaf cutter I cut crown shapes. To make it fit the top of the 3 I recut the crown shape with the 3 cutter. Once the pieces were fitted together they were baked.

Here is how they looked when baked together. The crease is only on top as the underside bakes solid.

I was able to use the royal icing flowers as well as some of the same icing colors from my Easter set to finish these.

The wands were just small star shapes baked with a small cookie stick. I added the ribbon with a twist tie so it was easy to remove.

Using one of the photos I took of my grand-daughter's cookies I was able to make it into a birthday card for her.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Camouflage Cookies - Tutorial

I made these camouflage cookies recently for my grandson's birthday. In this post I'll be showing the step by step process of how I added the camo colors to the number eight cookies.

 I won't be showing how I did the dog tags shown above, but the process is pretty much the same as with the number 8 cookies. The tags were cut out using a circle cutter that I reshaped by straightening out two sides, and a straw was used to make the hole. When it came time to decorate I outlined the center rectangle area first in the darkest color and let dry. The center was then filled in with the lightest color and left to dry. Camo colors were applied to the edge with the same wet on wet technique as I show below. The strings are edible licorice laces.

To get an idea of how I wanted the camo to look on my cookies, I traced around my number 8 cookie cutter and scanned that into my computer where I multiplied it to fit a sheet of 11"x8.5" paper.

The number cutter is from a set by Wilton.

I superimposed the eights over a camo design and printed it out for reference. This gave me a great starting point as to the scale I wanted, and showed me how to extend the colors over the surface to give a more realistic look. After about the 6th cookie I found I wasn't referring to the photo anymore.

I mixed my icing colors using the paper I printed out as a color guide, and thinned it down until it was the consistency of white glue. Thin enough to work with, but thick enough to hold it's shape while adding another color.  

Using the camo printout as a guide I started adding random shapes. I didn't let the colors dry in between adding each one because I wanted a seamless flat surface.

I just kept continuing on filling in spaces.

Almost done.

Finally finished!  These cookies were fairly easy and fast to do because I didn't have to wait for each color to dry before adding another, and the extra step at the beginning made sure the camo design wasn't too small and tedious to work with. 

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Fantasy Get Well Flowers

I made a quick bunch of fantasy flowers for my baby sister in Alaska using some cutters I made a couple of years ago for (these). I wasn't able to make them into an actual bouquet for her because I knew they probably wouldn't  make it there without some breakage.

These are some of the background and filler leaves. Sorry for the blurry photo, but I took these really fast so they could be sent out and didn't preview them first.

A couple more leaf sets.

Larger fantasy flower set.

2 more fantasy flowers.

Smaller filler flowers.

Here is the whole set arranged into a bouquet of sorts. I took this photo and made it into a get well card for her.  That way as she's unwrapping all the individual cookies she can look at this photo and at least get some idea of what was in my head.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥