Summer Fun Cookies Decorating Tutorial

I love making decorative cookies that are bright and fun, and summer is the perfect time to make them!  If you remember my ocean cookies you may remember the starfish, sailboats, and seashells, but this time I wanted to amp up the color even more.  What more perfect cookies to do to celebrate summer than brightly colored beach themed cookies?

Summer Beach Cookies

Decorating level: Easy-Medium
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Sugar Dough Recipe or my gluten free chocolate sugar dough
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" round cookie cutter, starfish cutter, sailboat cutter, and seashell cutter
• 6 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Three-Six #2 round tips
• Three #3 round tips
• Food Safe Markers
• Toothpicks
• Gel food coloring:
• Lemon Yellow
• Sky Blue
• Deep Pink or Soft Pink with a drop of Fuschia

Once your cookies are baked and fully cooled, you can begin to decorate!  Since they all use the same three colors, I would decorate them silmultanouesly, however, I will lead this tutorial one by one.  So basically, I would do all the outlines, then all the flooding and first layers, then all the second layers once the first are fully dried.

Prepare a thick, outline bag with a #2 tip and a flooding bag with a #2 or #3 tip of each color.  So six bags in total, two of each color, two different viscosities. 

Let's start with the Sailboat:

I chose to do all my outlines in one color.  Since these are more decorative than realistic and more about bright, fun, summery colors, realism wasn't really my concern.  If you choose to make a more realistic looking boat, you may want to outline each part with the color it will be filled.

Allow the outline to dry before flooding.

Once the outline is dried, fill with whatever colors you choose in the looser icing.  Use a toothpick to get into small areas like the top flag or the hull.  Once the boat is filled completely, allow this layer to dry, several hours to overnight even.

Using the thick icing again, re outline the boats for more definition.

There you have it!  In three easy steps the boats are all done!

Now for the Beach Ball:

The Beach Balls lines were a little trickier than I thought in order for them to look real.  So I drew them with food safe markers onto the cookie first to get them correct.  I then use the thick icing to trace the lines.

Once the outline is dry, fill with the flood icing.  If you are using three colors, fill the opposite sections with the same color, leaving two empty sections in between.  When filling the 2nd color, make sure to do the same.  Finish with the third.

Once the beach ball is completely filled and that layer is completely dry, re outline with the thick icing to define it again.

Allow to completely dry and the beach balls are done!

Now for the starfish.  If you're on vine, follow me on vine for decorating and baking videos!

Here are my vine's for the process for the starfish:

Outline and fill all the starfish solidly and allow to completely dry.

Once the bottom layer is completely dry, using the thick icing do the dots on the second layer.  I used different colors for the center, large, dot and for the medium sized dots on the arm.  Then I filled in with small dots that matched the flood color for texture.

The starfish are now complete!  A little different process than the previous too but still pretty easy!

And last but not least:

The shells are arguably the most "difficult" of this set, but once you get the pulling technique down it is really simple, but looks really impressive!  I've done video tutorials on pulling techniques here, but I also did a vine to show the stage.

Outline the shells with the thick icing and allow the outline to completely dry.  You're going to be using a toothpick to create the ridged look, so you'll be risking hitting the outline quite frequently.  If the outline is completely hardened this won't be a problem, if it hasn't set you can break it.

Now this kind of decorating you need to do one cookie at a time.  Using the flood icing, fill the shell solid.  Then using the thick icing, make arched lines that follow the curve of the shell.  Then taking the toothpick, pull lines from the top of the shell to the base.  I follow the groves of the cookie cutter.

 Allow to completely dry and then your summer cookies are complete!!