I love magnolia blooms. They don't grow on my property, but I walk past a house in my neighborhood with the most beautiful magnolia tree in their front yard and I just stop and stare. Of course they only bloom for like 30 seconds in the spring. So I decided to make magnolia cookies to admire and love these flowers a little longer.
The cookie cutters are my own. I designed them, and my partner used his computer magic to print them for me. While we used to sell our physical cookie cutters, we've taken a break from that venture for a little while. We do, however, still sell our STL files. If you have a 3D printer, you could still have the shapes. You can find those files (along with transfer sheets, and more) in our Etsy shop. (Soon it will all be moving to the shop here on this site, and we may even start offering physical cutters again! Change is good!)
If you would like to purchase the PDF file to hand cut these shapes, that can be purchased here:
If you need my royal icing recipe, you can find that here:
For information regarding consistencies and coloring tips, click here:
Here's the Youtube video for these cookies, scroll down for the written tutorial.
For these cookies I mixed 3 shades of cream/ white, and one shade of green. I prefer to work with an outline and a flood consistency instead of an all-in-one consistency. Sometimes I use all-in-one icing, but not when I have intricate designs, like these flowers.
I also use tipless bags. I only use piping tips when I'm making flowers.
Here's some products that I personally love to use while making cookies. These are affiliate links.
Here's a breakdown of the icing colors and consistencies for this specific set.
White icing: No gel color added. Out line/ detail consistency and flood.
Light cream: teensy pinch of brown (see my post on coloring tips linked above), and teensy teensy bit of yellow. Outline/ detail consistency and flood.
Darker cream: Same as above, but a teensy bit more brown. Outline/ detail consistency and flood.
Green: Leaf green, plus small amount of yellow, plus small amount of brown. Outline/ detail consistency and flood.
When prepping your piping bags, be sure to clip the holes at the end of the bag very small. I start small, then I can always make them bigger. If you have a ruler in front of you, keep the hole around 1-2 millimeters (not centimeters!).
Let's start with this open magnolia shape. I don't typically use food safe markers on the base of my cookies, only because I'm terrified it will bleed into the icing when it dries. So instead, when I have a complicated shape like this, I with scratch the surface of the cookie with my scribe. This way I know where to pipe my outlines. See photo.
Using the outline consistency of the darker cream color, outline the petals as shown.
Using the darker cream flood, fill in the three petals as shown and scribe them flat as needed. It doesn't matter which three you do first as long as they do not touch. We want the petals to have definition, so after flooding these parts, set the cookie aside to crust for 10-15 minutes. This way when we add new sections they will have separation and dimension.
Add the leaf outlines with the green detail consistency (picture to the left). Flood in one side of the leaves (picture to the right).
At this same time, you can flood in three more petals, as long as they are not touching the freshly flooded green sections. Set aside to crust again. About 10-15 minutes.
Flood in your final petal. Then flood in the other sections of leaves. Be extra careful next to the petal that was just flooded. Set this aside for 10-15 minutes to crust. Do not let it dry completely. We're going to add some small detail on top of some of these petals. If the base is completely dry, the new details will crater.
Using the outline consistency, create 3 dimensional shapes as shown before. Imagine the petals are folding up into the flower, so you can see the inside, and the outside of some of the petals. By doing this after the base has crusted, but not dried, these details will look smooth and not crater.
And finally, using the green detail consistency, add the center of the flower with small straight lines creating a cone shape. If you use the flood, or even an all in one consistency, this center part will not have as much detail.
For our next cookies, we have the other two magnolia shapes that are fairly similar.
Let's start with the stemmed magnolia.
Scrape in the petal shape, the same as with the first cookie. Using the white outline consistency, outline the petals. Use the green outline to outline the stem and the leaves. Flood in one side of each leaf with green flood, and be sure to scribe as needed.
Same as with our first cookie, we're going to flood sections that do not touch. Let them crust for 10-15 minutes before moving forward to the next photo. At this point, your base petals should all be flooded, except for the center petal, and both sides of all leaves should be flooded as well.
Once those initial petals have crusted, you can add the 3D element of the petals, as shown below. Notice I have not flooded that main central petal yet.
As our final step, once everything else has crusted, flood in the final last petal.
For our final design, it's similar to the second magnolia, but I did flood the petals in a different order. So you can take a look at both and choose which one you like better.
We begin the same as before, scratching the petal designs into the cookie with our scribe. Using the lighter cream outline consistency, outline all the petal shapes. Using the flood, fill the ones as shown.
Outline the leaves with green, and flood one half of them. Flood in petals that don't touch, the same as before, scribing as needed. Let each step crust for 10-15 minutes before flooding in the next section(s). Notice on this cookie I chose to flood that middle leaf before adding the extra details to the petals. It doesn't affect the final product a ton, but there is a slight difference in appearance.
Once those base petals have crusted, add the 3D elements just as before. See the photos below.
For this full set, I decorated three of each flower, in each shade; one white, one cream, one darker cream. Let your cookies completely dry, and set them up next to an open window to snap some pictures!
Please let me know if you make these lovely flowers!
Thanks for talking cookies with me,
-Savannah
Comments