Hurrah the wedding season is coming… don’t we all just love a wedding! Weddings take place every month of the year but here in the UK we tend to associate weddings with the summer months. So as the days warm up and you get the feeling that winter may be behind you just know summer is on its way… which means lots of weddings. Lindy is no stranger to the wedding cake, an important ingredient of most weddings. She spent many years designing and making cakes for bridal couples. In recent years Lindy has turned her artistic talents towards the wedding cookie. They have become incredibly popular as a unique sweet treat at weddings and to give as favours. Decorate, pop in a cellophane bag and tie with pretty ribbon. Simple, stylish and unique to a special day. It doesn’t get more fabulous than that!
So, here I am sitting amongst a lovely class of students writing this blog live! As the class progresses through the day I am observing and typing, laptop on my knee, sitting next to Lindy, the queen of cake decorating!
Lindy started the class with the wonky wedding cookie, a cookie version of her famous wonky tiered cake. Elaborately decorated with stripes and little flowers. I am loving the colours our students are using. I think Lindy’s love of bright colours is rubbing off on our cake fans… pink and greens together, turquoise, lime and dark greens, shocking pink, summer yellows, teal… it is lovely to see these colours being used. Lindy encourages her students to do each tier, there are three, of the cookie in a different colour or style. For example one tier may be a solid colour adorned with a few little flowers, another may be candy striped and the third stencilled. This is a super way of learning and using a lot of techniques together.
A wedding cookie collection wouldn’t be the same without a heart shaped cookie which is what the students are decorating now. Lindy has just demonstrated how to use stencils, a favourite technique of hers. Using either royal icing or lustre dusts the students are now going stencil crazy on their cookies. Some are covering the whole cookie, some are simply stencilling a corner. Every time I see stencilling it reminds me of what a user-friendly and incredibly effective technique this is. I love Frances’s dusky pink cookie which she stencilled with ‘claret wine’ coloured lustre dust…it looks like velvet damask! Stunning.
Maxine has taken some time to go off on her own creative path and has created a gorgeous shaped tea-pot. She has covered it in blue sugarpaste then stencilled it using a mixture of silver and gold lustre dust. Very glitzy!
Caroline Quentin lookalike Kim hasn’t done cake decorating per se but she does do sugar modelling and she has been asked to make cookies for her brothers wedding!! No pressure then!! She has had us in stitches about her taskJ Her purple heart shaped cookie with a stencilled pattern in white is very pretty… I wonder if he would be happy with that!
Joining the class today are two of our colleagues Emily and Victoria. Emily is part of our mail-order team and Victoria works in stock control. It’s their first sugarcraft workshop ever! I remember my first workshop with Lindy and being so worried I would be hopeless… I kind of was… but it is the best day out and I was very proud of my funny sugarcraft creation!! I must say that Emily and Victoria obviously have hidden artistic talents that they have been keeping from us… their cookies look GOOD!!
Victoria has created a white heart with an ornate crown stencilled with bronze lustre dust. She thought they would be fab for a Royal ‘street party’. I agree, simple but so stylish… and regal.
Julie-Anne has a mighty task ahead of her. She is making 250 pink cookies for a Breast Cancer Charity Ball in April. We’re impressed. Hopefully with all the skills she has learnt today her cookies turn our as fantastic as her enthusiasm and support for such an important charity. Good for you Julie-Anne.
Now it’s time to emboss. Embossing is a great technique and really couldn’t be easier. Whilst you can buy specific sugarcraft embossers, and we sell a lot at Lindy’s Cakes, you can use anything to emboss your sugarpaste. You press the embosser into the paste and voila your pattern is there. Embossing gives your sugarpaste texture and is very effective. Kathy has embossed her fabulous blue wonky cookie and it looks so lovely.
So many techniques, too little time. It’s always the way, no sooner are you on a roll and creating some gorgeous cookies that it is time to pop your cookies in box and head home. The class can’t last forever and we find our students are never ready to go home, but what does last forever are the hints, tips, techniques and skills you will pick up on a Lindy Smith workshop. Invaluable… at least when it comes to cake decorating cake decorating!!!
If you’d like to join us on a similar class why not take a look at our workshop calendar to help you decide which to choose.
Lauren says
all those cookies look too beautiful to eat!