Thursday 1 November 2012

Halloween Cupcakes 1: Severed Ears

Halloween is the season for ghosts and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties... it is also the time for macabre creativity in the domain of cupcakes....

....like these SEVERED EAR cupcakes!!!



Now I have to admit to something here: my creative Halloween juices had barely started flowing (arterially spurting??) before I chanced upon this amazing book. Yes indeed! A Zombie Ate My Cupcake, by Lily Vanilli, absolutely full of ghoulishly shocking designs!!

So I have to admit that I got derailed on this one, and both of my Halloween cupcake offerings this year are from designs by the amazing Ms Vanilli.







I decided I HAD to try some severed ears as a topping for a cupcake. Van Gogh would have been proud. So the first step, obviously, was to come up with some ears:

Ms Vanilli does not include detailed instructions of how to make ears, so I started with the obvious decision....


... Take a photo of my OWN ear. I needed to use SOMETHING as a model. If you'd like to use my ear too, you're welcome - ear modelling comes for free from Dr Cupcake.













The next step was to mix up some shell-pink, ear-coloured fondant icing.
For instructions on how to mix gel colouring into fondant, click here.









Then I pulled off a small piece, about the size of a walnut, and rolled it into an oval shape.















I then hollowed this out with my finger....
















... gradually creating a rim around the right-hand edge and a deepening curve in the centre.















I used the rounded end of a small plastic fork (but you could use anything similar) to help me get the rim all rounded and hollowed out.














So you then end up with something a bit like this:

















From here, I started to try to copy the contours in the inner ear from the picture of my own ear. This was quite tricky.














Each ear turned out a little differently, but basically this was the finished product, which then just needed to be left somewhere dry and shady to harden up.














This shows you how the ears all ended up slightly different to each other. The one on the right is HIDEOUS, isn't it? Sorry 'bout that.










I then decorated three out of the six ears with little silver studs. I wanted to also make some little gold rings, but I didn't think I would be able to make them of fondant without them looking a bit clumsy so I just went with the 'plain' look for the other ears.



Having done the ears and left them to dry (I left them to air dry for a few days, but they would have been fine to use within an hour or so) I needed some cupcakes, of course.

I haven't used a 'cupcake mix' since I was about 12, but I had a special purpose for trying this one: it is both gluten-free and dairy-free, and several of the intended recipients needed this to be the case. My experiments with doing my own recipes for these dietary requirements are a little haphazard, so I did think I would try Macro's Gluten Free Cupcake Mix (pictured).

All that needed to be added were two eggs and a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil. As you see this produces a light fluffy pale-coloured mix. Uncooked, it tasted okay, although it was disturbingly textured - almost gritty, in the way that rice flour can be.
I should have taken a pic of the cupcakes as they came out of the oven but I forgot. Anyway, they were better than I expected: they cooked evenly, rose smoothly and tasted nice, and were very light, in the way that shop-bought cupcakes made with confectioners' flour often are.

The packet icing mix which was also gluten and dairy free (when made up with Nuttelex or a vegetable based margarine) is the yellowish, loosely-piped icing in this picture. I found it only made enough icing for seven cupcakes....
...So I had to improvise with the rest, and, goddammit, I had no icing sugar in the house...

I substituted with royal icing. This produced an ultra smooth, glossy icing that (warning, Will Robinson, warning) tends to start off quite hard and goes softer, and has a tendency to run off the edges of the cupcake, as you see in one of the cupcakes above.



This horribly blurry picture shows the next stage: attaching the ears to the top of the cupcakes.

Of course, severed ears need some blood, and some glossy gel icing in the appropriate colour was just the ticket.












I really just placed the ears on top of the cupcakes rather than 'attaching' them. I squirted 'blood' all down the side of the ear, then freehanded some little blood trails in the icing, just for extra shock value.














They made for an impressively bloody Halloween centrepiece!

Happy Halloween from Dr Cupcake!!













Monday 22 October 2012

A Collingwood FC cake for a football-mad boss

No one who knows my boss (or for that matter, any of his relatives) could doubt that he is football-mad. Not only was he rather a good player in the State league, he has a lifelong, mad allegiance to the Collingwood Football Club. Unfortunately, Collingwood (despite its passionate fan base) is the most unpopular club in the history of Australian competition, so when it came to the boss's birthday, I had an extremely difficult decision to make...

...Could I quell my own distaste for his hideous team....










... In order to make him happy with a Collingwood-themed birthday cake??

Well, clearly, it turns out that I could, and did. Many doubted my sanity, but I pushed onward, and tried not to think of all the Collingwood supporters leering at my cake with their gappy-toothed smiles and their jailhouse tattoos.













First I needed a model for the dreaded Collingwood logo, so I turned to the interwebs for that. I tried to find the clearest graphic that I could:













Then I needed to start with the basics - this is a chocolate mud cake coated with chocolate ganache and hot-knifed to be absolutely smooth.

For detailed instructions on that process, click here. (The link relates to ganaching cupcakes, but the process is the same for larger cakes.)

I then rolled a large sheet of white fondant icing and covered the cake's top and sides entirely with it, trimming the base carefully.





Now it was time to get to work on the detail. I cut two wavy triangles for the two flags at the base of the logo. The black-and-white Collingwood flag was fairly easy, but this one - the Australian flag - was fiddly.

I started with the Union Jack in the corner and then drew the outlines of the stars. Then I coloured in the rest in blue. I used food grade (non toxic) textas - the cheapest and easiest way to get these is to go to a good toyshop and ask for non toxic, washable children's markers. Crayola is fine for food colouring and works well.






I cut a tiny shield from rolled white fondant and printed the requisite foundation date of the Club (as neatly as I could - it's not easy to print neat letters with a soft nibbed texta onto soft-surfaced findant).














This picture shows several of the elements of the logo together: you can see the flag shapes partially cropped from the picture at the bottom, still unpainted, the shield shape, not yet printed, the wheat sheaves to go on the sides and the main oval plaque. I cut out all of the shapes first and put them together loosely so I could work out whether the basic proportions were right.

White-on-black lettering is harder than black-on-white, because you must first draw hollow letter shapes, then colour carefully around them. You can see this process underway in this picture.




The magpie in the centre was a hand drawn equivalent of the one on the logo - it could have been better but it was ok for this purpose. I copied it as closely as I could from the picture because the trick with this kind of cake is to be as accurate as you can.













The finished logo was assembled from each individual piece after each had been coloured/lettered. I used a very small amount of water to stick the pieces together - you need to be really careful when using water near colourings, as the cake's surface was pure white, and there is always a danger that the colours may run - you have been warned.












Presentation of the cake was somewhat delayed, as the boss was out of the office on the actual day, with a shocking feverish cold. We got it couriered to his house where it managed to put a smile on his face - and even better, he brought the remains of it back to work the next day, so we all got a chance to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Collingwood logo in a ceremonial, knife-wielding way!


Happy footballing from Dr Cupcake!

Chocolate cake leftovers can be fun!

If you ever make a cake or a batch of cupcakes and there is some mixture left over, here's a great tip:

Dr Cupcake's Great Cake Tip #43: NEVER THROW EXTRA MIXTURE AWAY.

Take the Wombles as your role model. If you are as old as me then you'll know that the Wombles, while they were underground, overground, wombling free, were ALSO making good use of the things that they find, the things that the everyday folk leave behind:
Yes indeed. And I bet they were fond of chocolate cake (although I can't say that for sure), and further, I bet you anything you like that, had they had extra cake mixture left over from a batch, they would have turned it into a smaller tin, cooked it, and come out with something..... looking rather like this:






.... looking rather like this:

- Which they would have put in the freezer, slightly flat and unattractive-looking as it was, in the certain knowledge that, ONE DAY SOON, it would find a use.

The Wombles, whilst whipping up a batch of ganache for their last cooking project, and finding that there appeared to be too much ganache for their purposes, would, almost certainly, have done.....








....THIS, and scooped it unattractively into a sandwich bag, to be popped in the freezer for a later event.

And this is exactly what you and I should do, too.....













Because, the very next time you have a special occasion and absolutely no time to make anything fancy, you can rip your little flat cake and your messy ganache out of the freezer and do this with it, and no one will ever know that you haven't slaved over a hot stove for hours making it.

These are, obviously, little squares of rich chocolate mud cake topped with a warm, half-melted ganache and topped with some fancy sugar roses.....








.... Which I had no compunction in getting out of a packet - again, if you have the time, it's wonderful to make them yourself, but if you don't, it is really worthwhile to keep a few ready made ones in the cupboard.














I hand cut the cake squares with a sharp and heavy knife. It helps if the cake is not completely defrosted, or at least still very cold, when cutting - that way it is less crumbly and less likely to break into smaller pieces.

The good thing about the 'dolloped' ganache icing is that it hides any inconsistencies or breakages in the cake squares.












I was lucky enough to have both red and white roses to top the cakes with. The red were my favorites.
















And seriously one of the best things about the whole experience was the amount of washing up that I had to do at the end, which was:











Done, finito, from go to whoa in approximately 20 minutes ... and a roomful of appreciative chocolate smeared faces were none the wiser.

So, be like the Wombles, because they're cool and stuff.

Happy wombling from Dr Cupcake!

Ten Epic Cooking Failures from Dr Cupcake and her family

I've had countless cooking disasters. So have most people I know - in fact some of the best stories from my mum and other friends are about when cooking went terribly, horribly wrong.

Funny thing is, all those lovely cookbooks and foodie mags we read seem to describe some weird alternate cooking universe where eggs turn smoothly into custard, oil never catches fire in the frying pan and chocolate never freezes solid when it's supposed to melt. Cooking shows are a bit the same, although I admit Masterchef does have a few recipes for disaster (see what I did there?)

Plus, I had a couple of really weird moments recently when friends of mine told me they were thinking of cooking something sweet but they thought it 'wouldn't be good enough to show me'. I hate the idea that blogging about my cooking experiments might actually discourage people from trying things.

So this is a post dedicated to cooking failures, disaster stories, and tips and tricks for beginners at cooking sweets.

Failure No. 1 - Serving raw meat by accident
When Mum was first going out with Dad, she decided to impress him with her fine cooking skills at a dinner party. She decided to do a Beef Wellington which was big in the 1960s.  It's a long piece of eye fillet steak wrapped in pastry and baked in a hot oven, so that the pastry browns perfectly and the meat inside cooks to a perfect rareness - pink to red inside.
Problem was that Mum got a little confused and purchased Scotch fillet instead of eye fillet. Any difference? Well, yes, because Scotch fillet is about double the size of eye fillet. So instead of a beautiful rare piece of juicy steak, Mum carved at the table, for everyone to see, a massive raw hunk of meat encased in pastry. She was forever grateful to Dad for setting a polite example and manfully chewing his way through raw scotch fillet. Neither of them ever really got over this incident.

Failure No. 2 - Setting yourself on fire in front of the whole family
It was Auntie Petra's turn to host the family Christmas dinner. She had made a traditional plum pudding of which she was rightly proud. Finally the big moment came to flame the pudding. Carefully she heated the brandy and poured a generous quantity over the pudding, where it pooled deeply in the bottom of the dish. Then, with dining room lights turned off, she lit the brandy and began walking quickly in from the kitchen. Too quickly. With the speed of her gait, the flaming brandy slopped all over her hands, then her arms. She shot into the darkened dining room shrieking, with arms, hands and pudding aflame. Luckily, brandy flames at a low temperature, so she wasn't seriously injured, but the rest of the family will never forget Petra and The Pudding.

Failure No. 3 - Setting the kitchen on fire 
I was sixteen and home alone at Dad's flat while he was working late. I decided to make some eggs and bacon for dinner, as you do when you're sixteen, and I got the frying pan onto the heat and poured some oil in it to prepare to cook. Meanwhile, an interesting program on the telly caught my attention, and I strolled into the lounge to check it out.
A few minutes later I became aware of an odd orange light emanating from the bar that linked the kitchen to the lounge. I slouched across, in a teenagery way, to investigate and discovered that the entire wall of the kitchen was covered in flames. The plastic exhaust fan was melting into the frying pan, all the wood cupboards were blackening and starting to catch. I was strongly tempted by the option of running, screaming, for the front door and leaving it to burn, but I did feel a bit guilty at the thought of burning Dad's house down. So I bravely dumped a full box of flour on the source of the fire and batted the other flames with a wet teatowel. I caught it just in time. The smell of charcoal, burnt flour and melted plastic was truly awful. I retired to Mum's house and left a note on Dad's door with the immortal words, "Hi Dad. It's not as bad as it looks. Love Astrid.'

Failure No. 4 - The cat sat on it
It was Dad's 50th birthday and Mum was fired up to make a meringue and buttercream layer cake, with the meringue layers piped into the letters '5' and '0'. Everything was going swimmingly. The delicate meringue layers formed the numbers perfectly, and Mum stacked them in between sheets of baking paper in a stack on our kitchen table.
We popped out to get the final decorative touches before the cake was assembled. By the time we returned, Lord Henry Wootton, in his inscrutable feline way, had discovered the meringue stack. The combination of softness and crinkly paper proved irrestistable and he created a nest for himself by crushing all the meringue to fit perfectly around his plump form. Ww found him there dozing peacefully when we returned. The meringue was ruined.

Failure No. 5 - Chili can burn your lips off  (part 1)
Mum and her half indian boyfriend (pre-Dad) went to an Indian restaurant. They liked spicy food and prided themselves on being able to handling chili better than most. The waiter encouraged them to go for a medium hot curry, but they declared, perhaps a little dramatically, that they could cope with any and all chili. The resulting meal (which they had to eat, to save face) left blisters around Mum's lips. Ouch.

Failure No. 6 - Chili can burn your lips off  (part 2)
When staying with a friend overseas I offered to cook a delicious szechuan bean curd dish for my host and his friend. I had cooked it many times and knew the recipe backwards. I went shopping and bought my critical ingredients - hoisin, bean and chili bean sauces. Confident in my recipe, I also failed to taste the dish before I served it.
My pleasure at doing a good deed for my host turned to fascinated horror as I saw his face change into a grimace of pure pain and he rushed from the room after one mouthful. I had assumed that the sauces I used  in Australia were exactly equivalent in chili levels as they were in Hawaii. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong, and I'd put enough chili in my recipe to kill people.

Failure No. 7 - Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Many people say that when you are using eggs for cooking, you should break them one by one into a little bowl, then add them to your main mixing bowl, in case by chance you get a bad egg. After doing this for years and never getting a bad egg, I dispensed with this unnecessary step and just broke all my eggs straight into the main bowl.
Shortly afterwards I was making a cake which required five eggs. I had six in the fridge - excellent. I cracked the first four in the bowl - no problems. When I cracked the fifth, a hideous smell permeated the entire kitchen and a black slimy egg slopped into my mixture. I had to (a) dispose of the now stinking mixture and (b) go out to get more eggs.

Failure No. 8 - Trying to poison your friends more than once
I had a dear friend in my student days who was the easiest-going guy on the planet. He was a muso and looked like a Viking God and was also incredibly nice. One small thing, he was allergic to seafood. Not a big deal, because who eats seafood all the time when you're a poor student?
I often had people round for dinner. Bizarrely, whenever Adam came, I served seafood. It happened at least four times. My memory is fine. I am a considerate person. I knew about his allergy. I still can't understand why I consistently nearly poisoned one of my best friends. If you're reading this, Adam - sorry, man.

Failure No. 9 - Flying across the kitchen (in a bad way)
Another awesome story of Mum's and far less likely to happen these days, because gas stoves have a different kind of gas in them than they did in the 1960s which was when this tale occurred. Mum tried to turn on and heat up the oven, but the flame went out. The gas, of course, did not - it kept hissing into the oven like billy-o. Mum tries valiantly to light the oven again, and was just a little delayed by the match failing to strike... finally a lit match was thrust into the oven... and BOOM! Mum was blown across the kitchen by the blast and lost her eyebrows and eyelashes. She was otherwise uninjured apart from a heavy blow to her chef's pride.

Failure No. 10 - Drinking and cooking do not mix
This reflects quite badly on me but I'll tell it anyway. I had my new boyfriend over for dinner for the very first time. I didn't want to go too formal, and I wanted something that would resemble 'man food' without going to the lengths of cooking a big steak, which I'm not really that crash hot at, having been vegetarian for six years or so. So I settled on the perfect first-date-dinner, an easy-cook, man-food special: BEEF TACOS.
Now, tacos in a packet from the supermarket are ridiculously easy to cook, indeed, I would have said they were pretty much impossible to screw up. I fried off some beef mince with onions and added the spice mix; I prepared, in advance, the shredded lettuce, grated cheese, sour cream, salsa with fresh tomatoes chopped through it. The beef mince was keeping warm in a pan on the stove and everything else was in attractive little bowls, ready to dip into for some last-minute, easy taco assemblage. Nothing could go wrong.
New boyfriend arrives, and I'd already had a stiff drink or two because I was a bit nervous. Everything was going swimmingly, except that I ended up having another drink... then another.. then another until by the time I came to actually serve up the tacos, I was pretty well sozzled. All I had to do was heat up the taco shells in the oven. Which I did... using the whole lot at once, and drunkenly setting the oven at 220C (nuclear explosion temperature) and then forgetting, until a burning smell became apparent, that I'd even put them in. I BURNT THE TACO SHELLS. Yes, you too can become an idiot when the appropriate amount of alcohol is involved.
The only positive thing about this incident was the priceless text message the new boyfriend received the next morning which he still snickers about : "I burnt the tacos and passed out on the couch, are you sure you want to see me again?"


Sunday 21 October 2012

Dr Cupcake's Savoury Muffin Odyssey

As you know, Dr Cupcake is very fond of sweet things. But sometimes, only a savoury something can really hit the spot. My savoury muffin odyssey began one week ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when I had a hankering for the sort of savoury muffin that, in my innocence, I thought would be found in every recipe book on earth: a light, tasty, warm and flavoursome treat packed with little bits of cheese, herbs and other delicious things, that would be ideal when roughly torn up and spread with butter. Something like this:

Imagine my horrified surprise when I looked through a good dozen cookbooks and came up with NOTHING. Nigella let me down badly. Bill Grainger - nothing. Jamie Oliver? NOTHING. Okay, I thought, maybe muffins are an American thing: I turned to the American goddess of home cookery and all-round domestic goodness, Martha Stewart. Martha had NOTHING!!

In desperation I went to my CWA binder-file cookbook. Surely the good ladies of the Country Womens Association would be on top of this one. Know what? If they are, they aren't sharing.
By this time I was getting very frustrated, but I had the interwebs, so I googled 'savoury muffins' and came up with a bundle of recipes, most of which sounded actually rather unpleasant. There was only one thing left to do. Make one up. So that's what I did. And that's what, in the interests of happy tummies everywhere, I am now going to share with you.

Dr Cupcake's Bestest Ever Savoury Muffin Recipe

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup plain (greek-style) yoghurt, or the same quantity of sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1 cup of the following chopped combined ingredients: sundried tomatoes, crumbled feta, black olives, chives, italian parsley
Small handful of grated cheddar or tasty cheese (optional)

Notes on the ingredients: You can substitute a good, balanced gluten free flour mix for the flour if you are gluten free but the miffins may have a shorter shelf life. You could substitute olive oil for the butter. For the flavourings, really I just thought of the flavours I wanted and threw them in - you should do the same.

Set oven to 175C. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and set aside.

You'll need two mixing bowls, one for the dry ingredients and one for the wet ingredients.

In one, put the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar and mix well.

In the other, break the eggs and whisk them together, then add the yoghurt, melted butter and milk.










Whisk all the wet ingredients until you get a smooth, creamy pale mixture. Then turn this into the dry ingredients and give it all a good stir to combine it well.















This is a selection of the ingredients I put in for the flavouring, and I could try to persuade you that they were all carefully selected but it would be more truthful to say they were "whatever I could find in the fridge at the time". Therefore I had half a brunch of fresh (ish) chives, half a wedge of beautiful handmade Elgaar farm marinated feta, a tub of black olives from the supermarket and the remains of a packet of grated tasty cheese left over from the pizza three days ago. Glamorous? Oh yes.







Here you can see my muffin mixture with the ingredients on top - I chopped the olives roughly, crumbled the feta, chopped the chives into the bowl with scissors and then added my SECRET (well, not so much now) ingredient: Gerwurzhaus 'Venetian Gondola Spice'. This is a mixture of onion, garlic, bell pepper, sea salt, parsley and pepper - well, that's what it says on the label, but this stuff tastes absolutely amazing - all I know is, there's a ton of umami in this little baby. Look for it online, you won't be disappointed.








After you've given the mixture a good mix, and distributed the flavourings evenly, dollop the mixture into muffin cases, as you see here. Don't fill them all the way up because they will rise.








Put them in the oven for about 20 minutes, but check them after 15 minutes. When they're risen and golden, and a skewer stuck into the middle of one comes out clean, they're done.

One warning - they do stick to the paper cases. If this is likely to bother you, either grease the paper before dolloping the mixture in, or dispense with the paper cases and oil the tin really well.





Serve with lashings of butter while still warm - or keep them in an airtight container for a few days - just warm them gently in the oven before you eat them.

With love from Dr Cupcake!!

Monday 13 February 2012

Polka dot heart cookies for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!
These are very dark chocolate cookies (or biscuits if you prefer) with royal icing and the occasional cachou.

The awesome thing about royal icing for cookies is that it sets rock hard, so you can pack them in layers and move them. I guess I'm really saying it's a very practical type of decoration. But - unlike shoes, which can only ever be one or the other - that doesn't mean they can't be pretty.








I started off doing polka dots but got a little creative and did a few other patterns using the same basic colours.

This type of decoration requires royal icing of two different consistencies: line icing (around the edge to hold everything else in place) and flooding icing (everything else).

First to the cookie: I used a 'Super Chocolatey Biscuits' recipe from the Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits - in fact you'll know if you see this book around because there is a polka-dotted heart cookie just like this one on the front cover. Great book. GREAT book.




Ingredients:
275g plain flour
100g self raising flour
75g cocoa
125g granulated sugar (I used caster, it was fine)
125g salted butter, diced
125g golden syrup
I large egg

Sift the flours and the cocoa into a large bowl, then add the sugar and mix well. Rub the cubes of butter into the dry mixture with your fingers until you get a consistency like moist breadcrumbs.



Make a well in the centre and pour in the golden syrup and the egg (okay, yes I forgot to beat the egg before I added it - so sue me).

Gently mix everything together just until it forms a solid ball of dough. Then turn this out onto your benchtop.





My dough wouldn't come together properly at first so I added a little more golden syrup until it did. I think this was because the eggs I used weren't huge - just be aware that the actual quantities of the recipe are not as important as the  look and feel of it. You need to end up with a smooth, solid dough - adjust the quantities if you need to.

Divide the dough into two equal parts and wrap both in clingfilm. Place one part in the fridge while you roll out the other part.






Rolling out the dough can be tricky - the best way is to roll it out between a piece of baking paper and a piece of clingfilm. You then use the rolling pin over the top of the clingfilm. It will be a hard dough to work, you need to press firmly and evenly until you get it to about 5mm thick.
When it's at this stage, lift the dough still in the baking paper and clingfilm onto a baking tray and pop it in the fridge for 15 minutes or so before you cut the heart shapes - it's supposed to be for longer than that, but I get impatient.







Stamp the shapes out with heart cutters. I have a set of these so I was able to do about five different sizes but you could do them all one size, it wouldn't matter. I found the dough stuck to the cutters a little and had to be gently eased out of them. Put the cut-out hearts onto a baking tray lined with baking paper, leaving at least a centimetre of clearance around each shape. You can re-roll the offcuts or gather them up and shape them into a ball and keep the dough for later.

When you've filled the tray, place it back in the fridge for half an hour. This prevents the dough from rising and distorting too much during the baking process. Preheat the oven to 170C. Bake the biscuits for 14-18 minutes (check after 14) until the biscuits look firm and cooked and slightly darker in colour.Gently lift each shape onto a rack with a spatula and leave until completely cool.

Icing time yay! Now, you could use a home made royal icing, and if I was really a decent cook I guess I wouldn't mind making one, but to be honest there's a packet mix available in every supermarket that is just as good and ten times easier. So save your energy and time for the decoration and use the packet mix (if you want a recipe for royal icing there are plenty on the interwebs).

You need two batches of icing: first the line icing. The consistency of this needs to be quite thick but not so thick that you can't pipe it - something like the consistency of very thick pure cream, or maybe slightly thicker. If you're unsure, keep it thick and test it in a piping bag - can you pipe it in a thin line? If not, thin it down until you can pipe a thin, hard solid line with no gaps.

Secondly you need to make a batch of flooding icing, which is thinner - you can make this, obviously, from your line icing by simply adding a little more water. The consistency of flooding icing needs to be like pouring cream.

You then need to tint the icing - I kept half the flooding icing white and tinted half of it rose pink, and I tinted the line icing pink.
So then you need to load the line icing into a piping bag. I always use disposable piping bags because I hate washing out canvas piping bags and also I don't really trust that you can ever get them totally clean, so for hygiene reasons it's just best to go the disposable option.

Snip off a tiny end piece of the piping bag and pipe a thin line inside the edge of the cookie. I was trying to make these lines as smooth and parallel to the edge as possible, but it takes a bit of practice and a very steady hand.





I used squeeze bottles for the thinner flooding icing. So for the flooding, just aim inside the lines. Easy....















... Or is it? This is what happens when the flood overtops the levee banks. Disaster.

I discovered that this can happen for two reasons (I guess they're both obvious). The first is that you put too much flooding icing on, and it just gets too high to be held back by the line icing. The second is that you damage the line icing somehow, either in piping or subsequently. This particular cookie was ruined because I brushed the edge of the line with my finger and shifted it. Goddamn.

You can rescue this disaster by waiting for the icing to harden a little and cutting the excess away.....



... But you can't rescue it when it has pulled all the pattern off with it!
D'oh.














Ok so let's get away from the disasters and back to the plot... you've managed to get the line icing sort of straight, and the flooding icing inside the lines. This is how it looks at that stage.












I thought I took a picture of polka dots being made but I can't find it, so you'll just have to imagine. The white flooding icing was in another squeeze bottle with a small circular nozzle. You need to hold the bottle vertically and squeeze very gently until a tiny drop of white icing falls onto the pink surface. It will spread a bit so don't put the dots too close to each other.








The stripe pattern starts the same way, with a plain pink flooding. The white flooding icing is piped in vertical stripes. Well, sort of vertical anyway.












I did a couple of these heart-within-a-heart shapes but I didn't like them very much because it was hard to do them accurately.













I used plain white flooding icing decorated with pink cachous for some of the smaller cookies. I really liked these because the pink line icing was just visible at the edges and it added an extra degree of detail - obviously in the shapes flooded with pink, the pink line icing is all but invisible.


Happy Valentine's Day everyone ... may you have a wonderful, happy, romantic, awesome day!