One good thing about summer coming to a close is that cooler and dryer weather is on the way, which is perfect for cookie decorating. Warm weather during the summer can bring on butter bleed, which happens when the butter from the cookie stains the royal icing and leaves it looking blotchy. It doesn’t have to be humid for it to happen, just hot (humidity brings on its own set of issues) I was even struck by butter bleed in the winter at one point, when I had my cookies sitting directly under one of the heat vents in my bake shop. Lesson learned! While butter bleed is preventable for the most part, there are still times when it’s just beyond our control. There’s more information about preventing and covering butter bleed in this post about royal icing. These brush embroidered swan cookies were a personal gift from me to a family member, so fortunately I had complete control over how they were decorated. My original design just included the swans, but when butter bleed struck, I had to change my plan. For products used in this and other tutorials, visit the recommended products page. This cookie was made using my Orange Vanilla Spice recipe and measures 2×4″. My cookie recipe is available in my tutorial shop. Begin by icing the cookie in flood consistency royal icing and a tip 3. The pink color shown here is Wilton aster mauve and the blue is delphinium blue, both from the garden tone set (you can find these colors on the recommended products page). Once the cookie is completely dry (8-12 hours of drying time), use a scribe tool to trace a heart template onto the icing. I traced a small heart cookie cutter onto card stock to make this template. Then, use the scribe tool to sketch the swans, using the heart as a guide for the shape of their necks. Using a tip 1 and flood consistency royal icing, outline and fill in the swans. Use the scribe tool to help shape the icing. Let the swans dry for about 4 hours, preferably in front of a fan. Notice the dark areas on the edges of the pink icing. That’s what butter bleed looks like. Once the swans are dry, add the wings using the brush embroidery technique. Make a beak with a little bit of orange icing and shape it with the scribe tool. A piping bag isn’t really necessary for this step. You could apply a drop of icing using the tip of the scribe tool or with a toothpick. This is where I started to improvise. I used the scribe tool to draw some swags and then added a lacy brush embroidered decoration. This is similar to how I added the curtains in the baby bassinet tutorial. I added a bead border with a tip 1 and a medium shade of brown royal icing. I also painted these beads using a mixture of gold luster dust and alcohol, which you can learn all about in this post on painting with gold. I finished the detail on the swans using an edible ink marker. Have you ever encountered butter bleed? How did you deal with the situation? Let me know in the comments! Click on the images below for more cookie decorating tutorials
Adorable Blueberry Baby Shower Cookies
Beautiful Cherry Blossom Cookies Decorated With Royal Icing
Cute Ladybug Cookies Decorated With Royal Icing
Amber Spiegel, founder of SweetAmbs, is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and the author of Cookie Art: Sweet Designs for Special Occasions. Amber has over 12 years of cookie decorating experience and has traveled the world teaching others how to decorate beautiful cookies on their own.
One of the easiest, most common fixes for combatting butter bleed is to allow your cookies to sit on paper towels while cooling and drying. Instead of coming through your royal icing on top, the excess butter will be absorbed right into the paper towels below.
If you're wondering this, and you've baked cookies and frosted them successfully, then you're doing something right and continue to do you. Butter bleed is when the oil and butter...essentially the fats from your cookie... bleed to your icing after it's dry.
Start with a base icing that has white gel added to it. Uncolored royal icing has an off-white natural tinge and is more likely to allow bleed and absorb color. Add white gel to your base to act as a stabilizer to prevent color bleed right off the bat. The biggest culprit in color bleed is usually oversaturated color.
However, I know several cookiers in humid climates that swear it affects everything from drying time to color bleeding. Overbeating- I am guilty of this. If you over beat royal icing, it dries to a crunchy almost foamy texture and often appears porous.
Keep each color stored in a separate container, to prevent them from bleeding into one another. Take your buttercream frosting out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature before you use it.
Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you'd expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.
“When chilled cookies bake, the butter stays in a solid form longer, slowing the spread,” says Dawn. “30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator does wonders, and you can bake the cookies right from the fridge.” Not only will chilling help the fats firm up and the flour hydrate, but it also helps the flavors develop.
What happens if you increase the amount of sugar called for in cookies? Conversely, when you increase the sugar in cookies, you'll get cookies that spread more and have an ultra moist and chewy texture in addition to a sweeter flavor.
Cornstarch does kind of incredible things to cookies. I mean not only does it give them soft centers, prevents them from spreading, and makes them somewhat thick (in a good way), but it also contributes to the chewiness factor, which, in my opinion, is the most important cookie attribute.
Color bleed tends to happen more often against white icing. One way to help prevent this is to actually color your white icing with white coloring. I like to use Americolor gel in Bright White OR Chefmaster gel in White OR The Sugar Art Master Elite in White.
Replying to @Corinne☀️ to prevent color bleed I always add white gel food coloring to my icing before any other colors and try not to oversaturate the icing with color. However, if I'm still nervous about color bleed, sometimes I'll cover the cookies in cornstarch as they dry overnight.
There's also a new technique going around when preventing craters in a second layer of icing: poke holes in the base flood (under the area you'll cover with a second layer of icing). You can even do this when the first layer flood has completely dried!
Undermix, and your royal icing looks translucent and is structurally weak. Overwhip, and you're giving too much volume to the egg proteins via air, causing the structure to weaken in a different way. Overmixed icing usually looks porous when dry, and sometimes will not even fully dry and be soft/brittle.
Adjust the butter temperature: If your cookies spread too much and turn out flat, it could be due to using butter that is too soft or melted. To fix this, refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes to firm up the butter.
Using melted butter in cookies helps you achieve a similar fudgy-yet-cooked texture and prevents any unwanted cakiness. Instead of the rise coming from both chemical and physical leavening agents (baking soda/powder + creamed butter), it now comes almost exclusively from chemical agents alone.
When it comes to colour, bright is just right! In the baking industry, many believe that adding white food colouring will help avoid colour bleeding. Simply add white food colouring to the royal icing before adding the desired colour. Or, if the icing is too dark, add white food colouring to lighten the shade.
“For the best results, choose a silicone baking mat or parchment paper to line your pan,” Dawn recommends. “Simply greasing your pan — basically adding fat to it — will encourage your cookies to spread.” (Check out our side-by-side test baking to see for yourself.)
Address: 359 Kelvin Stream, Lake Eldonview, MT 33517-1242
Phone: +577037762465
Job: Product Hospitality Supervisor
Hobby: Gardening, Web surfing, Video gaming, Amateur radio, Flag Football, Reading, Table tennis
Introduction: My name is Manual Maggio, I am a thankful, tender, adventurous, delightful, fantastic, proud, graceful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
We notice you're using an ad blocker
Without advertising income, we can't keep making this site awesome for you.
