give thanks+tutorial

This year, Nate is thankful for pumpkin spice toffee sugar cookies, adapted from this recipe.  He has been eating the dough out of the freezer as fast as I can make it.  I did manage to get a few cookies out of the batch, but I’m told the uncooked dough is even tastier than the cookies.

*If  you do make this recipe, be warned that the toffee bits will ooze a bit at the edges. This recipe makes a more rustic-looking cookie.  If you need a perfectly clean edge, this is not your cookie.

I started this set by outlining a circle cookie cutter and then drawing a simple fall foliage border around the edge.  The border is made up of three simple elements: 1. Branch with leaves, 2. Branch with berries, 3. Simple rounded branch.

As you will see below, I got a lot of mileage out of this little border.  I mixed and matched each of these three elements to create new designs for the whole set.

Start with a completely dried, fully iced cookie:

Start by piping the rounded branch, leaving a small amount of space between the edge of the cookie and your piped design.

Following the edge of the cookie, first pipe a branch and then leaves.

Add the final element (branch with berries).

Repeat around the entire edge of the cookie.  The trick is to make sure the spacing is correct (it took several tries to draw it on the graph paper, but it’s a one shot deal on the cookie.)  You can cheat the spacing a bit by increasing or decreasing the size of different elements.  You can see in the picture below that the final branch with berries is significantly larger than the other branches with berries, as I needed to make up the space.

That’s it!  Pretty easy.  Decorate the inside of the cookie with a seasonal message or a larger version of one of the foliage elements.

Once you have mastered each of these three branches, you can mix and match to create new combinations and designs.