What goes into designing a cookie from scratch to the final icing?
A lot of planning. A lot of back-breaking, labor-intensive work. Once I’ve decided on a design, then I have to make sure I have the ingredients. I always start with the icing, a simple white royal icing made of confectioner’s sugar, water and meringue powder, which I make the night before I start any new project. The next morning, I pull out the ingredients for the dough, and once my butter has reached room temperature, I mix everything together, roll it out, chill it, cut it and bake it. While I wait for the cookies to cool, I divide my icing into small batches, color each one, pour them into parchment paper cones and start decorating. Depending on the complexity of the design, I’d say that it takes between four and six hours to complete the whole process. How do you decide on a color pallet? It really depends on the design, but generally speaking, my approach is to not use colors normally associated with the images I create. For example, last Christmas, I made square cookies with blu
