hi Juliet your recipes for a sweet life this video is part of a special collaboration with seven other of my special YouTube friends we were challenged by Michele Hester who's the owner of sugar Vale to use sugar Vale in new and different ways on cookies and cupcakes and to do so with a wedding theme you may know of sugar veil as the edible lace material for wrapping around cakes I eat this stuff which indeed it is but in the making of this video I also discovered other ways to use it to decorate cookies not just making the traditional lace so in this video I'm going to show you how to do that I'm in fact going to show you how to emboss cookie dough using the mats that are usually used to make the lace and then I'm going to show you how to make this traditional lace but to wrap it to airbrush it and wrap it around cookies and then pipe with sugar veil in between the openings to create these beautiful enameled cookie boxes and what bride wouldn't love a special gift like this to give to her bridesmaids or even to get herself in addition to watching this video I hope you will check out the other seven videos that are part of this collaboration because there's some special treats in store ok let's start with what you'll need for this particular project since it's a sugar veil collaboration naturally we're going to need some sugar veil products in this particular video I work with two different sugar veil mats the first being their laces mat which is this long one here actually it actually comes twice the size I cut it in half for easier handling and the second mat which we'll be using for the lids of the boxes is the brooch is matte we'll also need some sugar veil product the powder which will mix with the water to create the lace that goes into these Madol and also some sugar veil spreading tools but cookie wise will need to contoured cookie rings I have a whole other video that talks about how we do that but I'll show you the setup momentarily for shaping those pieces these are about two and a half inches tall and two inches in Diane better when they fit together we'll also need two two and three-quarter inch fluted rounds to form the base of the box and the bottom of the lid these are all cut out of my gingerbread dough but other cookie dough's will work as well as long as they don't have a lot of leavening and don't spread too much or particularly for the contoured pieces and then lastly you'll need some embossed cookie pieces which I embossed using these mats and I'll show you how for little ovals for the feet a little extra detail for the topper and then this element is a leaf mold that didn't come from the sugarveil products but rather came out of another silicone mold which will form the actual handle of the lid let's talk about how we got some of these interesting shapes to form the basket first and foremost the side of the box I first cut a strip of gingerbread dough about two and a half inches tall and just long enough to fit halfway around the cylinder drape it over the cylinder stick that in the oven bake it at 375 cool it slightly and then pop it off the cylinder no dusting of flour on the cylinder but that video covers that in extensive detail for the leaf topper the handle I used a silicone mold this is an old one that I had from antique designer molds but I have some substitutes molds that I'll have in the video description and for this I actually bake in the mold because this particular mold is oven proof so I get the nice imprints when I bake in the mold as you can see in my molded sugar I molded cookie flour video that I did earlier so pack it in tap it flat with the back of a spatula sit it on a cookie sheet bake it as you normally would and then pop it out and you'll get a shape like that what you need to trim around to create the little leafy edge okay so onto sugarveil and how i use that to create some of the pieces i use the bridges mat to emboss both this little topper decorative piece and this piece that's going to be one of the feet of the box now I'm aiming for a box that looks like it's got metal filigree on it and is filled with enamel so I wanted to create some relief on the gingerbread pieces and I thought let's see if these sugarveil mats would work for that purpose they're only ovenproof up to 350 degrees so I can't bake in them the same way as I did this particular mold so I thought let's see if I can get an imprint with them some other way and I have a whole other video on this as well so I just want to quickly show you this here I start with a rough shape of the dough I don't flour the side going into the mold at all it will pop out relatively easily and I centered it around a particular pattern that I wanted to pick up and now I am going to lightly dust the back of it so my rolling pin doesn't stick to the dough because if it pops up and out of the mold onto the pin and I'll get a smudged imprint of the dough and I roll this pretty thin I find the thinner I roll it maybe an eighth of an inch thick the better impression I get now I flip it over and onto a well dusted silicone baking mat so that will go to in the oven and I gently peel away the mold and it's nicely done without any distortion and I'm going to use either this round cutter or maybe a slightly bigger one to cut out the topper piece and since I am going to be sticking a handle into it as well I did want to cut out a quarter inch opening in the center and for that I just use my number ten and number ten round tip now for the feet same process but I picked out a slightly different pattern I like this one because it had all these little ridges on the edges and vertices dal it'll oval cutter and just centered it on the parts that I wanted to capture cut out four of those for the feet if you're working on the mat handy thing is is you can just slide it on to your baking sheet stick that in the oven bake at the normal baking time and you're ready to go you might have noticed in the opener that I have some lids that have fancy little domes on them that was created much the same way but instead I embossed with the sugarveil laces mat and then draped the cut pieces over silicone hemisphere mold so here's a big one and here's a small one for the small box same process and I'll show that also in my dough texturing video that's coming up now that we've got all of our pieces nicely embossed we're ready to assemble the base the first step always with any contoured cookie project like my castle tears or my wedding cake tears is to make sure that the two sides nicely fit together and for that I've filed down the edges if the project is for show I'll file using sanding paper if it's for eating a micro planer will do the job it just takes a lot more time to use the micro planer or a file but you want to get the edges nice and flat so that there's a nice tight fit and if one edge is riding up higher you might also consider planing that down as well I'm using my thick royal icing glue I'm going to start just by putting a little bit on the bottom and making sure I clean up any extra that's sitting on the outside because that will interfere with borders and piping later I also want to reinforce it a little bit from the inside especially we're going to be putting anything in the box and now we're ready for the opposing side here I put a little bit on the bottom since I won't be able to easily reinforce it from the inside and also on those two edges and simply smashing them together now take your trusting needle make sure they're centered on the base take your trusting needle and clean up any extra icing the other thing I like to do is fill out the seam if there is if it's discontinuous in any way I'd like to fill that in with a little more icing and brown is okay we're going to we're going to spray this with pearl spray so it looks silver so it'll completely cover that Brown and in fact the brand will since it matches the gingerbread the color will look more uniform there you want to really fill those seams nicely because we're going to be wrapping this with sugar veil lace later and the flatter those seams are the nicer you could also use a spatula for this smearing process my hands are very clean but the flatter that seam is the flatter the lace will lay later because I want this to look like a metal box I'm airbrushing it or spraying it with pearl dust which will make it look silver and I'm going to start by spraying all of the pieces I'm using PME luster spray pearl which again you think pearl you think it's going to be white but it's going to look very silver on these give it a good shake first my work surface covered in a backdrop up here so spray doesn't go everywhere and you might want to wear a mask for this process to always give it a little test spray first and then I like to just do gradual add it very gradually about five or six inches away from the surface in a rotating motion so you get nice coverage where you want it if you get too close the pieces start moving around and if it starts pooling up then it's time to stop and let them dry a little bit let's start on the box same process all the way around you so now let's make the lace I'm using the lace mat and the first step is to dust the mat with cornstarch this keeps the lace material the sugarveil lace material from sticking and I usually start pretty liberally with circular motions to get it in there and I will shake out or brush out a lot of the excess because you don't want big clumps of it in there at all I don't want it very heavy I just want it so there's just you can just barely see it I'm going to be using the quick drying approach to using sugarveil where we're going to quick set it in the oven which calls for a blend of about to exactly 2/3 a cup of the powder with 1/3 cup of water and you mix it on medium speed with a paddle attachment for about 4 minutes until it's fluffy and white and pourable but it's very viscous as you'll see kind of stretchy or even the normal royal icing and shiny - quite shiny which has advantages I'll talk about later now I'm going to spread it into the mat I start by putting a little at the end I often put a little bit midway through as well and a very little bit a couple tablespoons will probably spill fill this whole mat if not more now to spread it I'm using the sugar veil spreading tulle spreader held at a low angle to make sure that you're pushing all of the material into the mat and pressing pretty firmly ensures that all the material gets into those grooves and you want to be wiping in multiple directions I'm holding my mat down because it's moving a little bit on this surface crosswise lengthwise back and forth and this just helps fill on any small micro pores in the lace which is critical to do because if you see any pores in it that's an area where the lace can potentially break when you unmold it and then these final swipes I'm taking off a lot of the excess on the surface so that you're seeing a lot more of the blue coming through from behind my edges are pretty clean they don't have a lot of excess sugar veil material on them which is great if they did you can take the sugar veil fin tool and clean up the edges little bit my next step is to set it onto the backside of my baking sheet which can be silicon lined or not mine happens to be and sit it in the oven i dry this particular lace at between 185 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about eight and a half to ten minutes the drying time is very much a function of the humidity in the ambient environment the more humid it is the longer it'll take to dry so usually I'm looking more for certain characteristics of the lace when I pull it from the oven that I am the actual drawing time I cover this in extensive detail on my upcoming lace making video so for now I'm going to set this in the oven we're going to cut to some lace I made earlier and start wrapping that around this particular project and this is what a finished piece of lace looks like if you're going to make it in advance I always store it on a piece of parchment paper in a sealed plastic baggie I've used a three gallon size which fits the length of this lace perfectly because if you don't as I said the lace is very humidity sensitive and if it's humid it'll be very very floppy or if it's dry out it'll break and become very very brittle but this is the normal handling consistency nice and flexible up to a period of time again if your environments dry you're going to have less time to move and shape it if it's humid it'll be quite floppy now my next step because I wanted this to look like silver filigree to match the lids was to spray it as I sprayed the size of the boxes but because this is white I started by spraying it silver first and then I put the Pearl Sheen over it here it is sprayed with the silver down first and then the Pearl sheet on top now I didn't wipe this particular matte particularly well after it came out of the oven and so you'll see some film of the sugar veil and some of the openings you know that's not the end of the world and it's not going to be some so noticeable when it gets up on my box against against the silver color there but if you do want to knock it out now is the time and while this is still flexible you can cut it so we want to work before this dries out so I'm going to cut along the top edge to create a straight edge head of my box is about two and a half inches which means I want to cut just beyond below the bottom center of this Daisy all the way across and the nice thing about sugar it's got kind of a built-in symmetric pattern so I can just follow that to help cut in a straight line let's just check the fit it's a little tall see how it's coming up a little bit above the top edge of the box I just want to trim a teeny bit more off so that we don't have that because that will interfere with the closing of the lid check the fit I think that's much better and now we want to lay it up I don't need the whole length so let's see how much we need because any extra just makes it harder to handle I'm going to cut it about here I want one of these nice little loopy patterns facing front though and this is the front of my box right here so I want to make sure I've got it nicely anchored there so the next step is just putting it down with a little corn syrup much as I glue a lot of thin things on to cookies a little along the upper edge and a little kind of in these spots here if you've airbrushed your lace or sprayed it the way I did this one it will get soft because the the spray kind of moistens the lace back up it'll get really soft and hard to handle in one piece like this so it's good to let it dry a little bit after you sprayed it before you attempt what I'm doing here otherwise it's more floppy and it's just harder to handle I'm standing corn syrup as I go to anchor it not too much they're added quite a lot it's going to show through but hopefully it'll be okay and pulling the lace taut but not stretching it because you don't want to miss shape the pattern that we're going to fill later so you can see I'm not putting that much corn syrup on just enough at the top and a few little touches at the bottom to keep it anchored so I'm almost ran to my back seam and you can see where there's it's connecting so I'm going to cut the excess off and again save remnants because they're always usable for something else okay we'll just finish off with a little bit of corn syrup on the seam just to make sure everything's anchored and flush against the cookie we're going to start next by piping with sugarveil now I showed you how to make lace and I'll show you in more detail on my lace making video how to make it but you can also pipe with sugar veil and I've got four different shades light pink a dark blue and two different shades of purple that are going to fill it out I use my normal liquid gel food coloring to color it sugarveil recommends using dry food colorings powdered food colorings when you get into darker shades but I'm finding with the range of colors we're working with today liquid gel works just fine so it's very viscous but runny it's kind of a flooding consistency like the royal icing flooding consistency and since I'm basically flooding halls in the lace it's perfect for that sugar veil also has a piping tool it's got a little compressor attached to it which makes for easier piping but this icing is very loose so I'm not having to apply a lot of pressure and I'm finding my parchment cone works nicely as there's a tendency sometimes to overflow these small holes I like to pipe every other one give them a little teeny bit of setting time and then come back in and fill the ones next to it couple notes about sugar veil as a pipes relative to royal icing it dries a lot shinier as I said which is kind of nice and cool but it also takes a lot longer to dry and if you expose it to humidity even after it's dry it can become tacky again so it's very humidity sensitive in a way that royal icing isn't once it dries now coming back in with those that were skipped and filling in and I'll continue in this vein to get all the blue all the way around the box you I'm applying quite a bit of icing here but then just pushing the rest to fill down to the tip one thing that I do notice is that sugarveil dries flatter than royal icing in some spaces particularly really small ones so you know a little bit of overfill helps because it will sink after it dries a little bit as royal icing does but it sinks maybe a little bit more so some amount of overfill might be good if you want these poofy but if you want them flat flush up against the side of the box then don't okay I've been working away and I've got the front of my box nearly complete I not only finished out these pink petals but I added a medium purple and a dark purple to the design as well and I'm just going to finish out the back of the box with those last two shades one thing to note I have this elevated and again that's just to get it at my eye level so I can really see into the areas that I'm piping and that's important to do and you can also from this as well without touching the product which is nice to do just minimizes the chances of you breaking anything and it also filled out a pattern here I'm hitting the seam of the lace and it's never going to be a good connection the patterns over there there's always going to be a disconnect there this one's pretty far off but usually I'm presenting these front side forward this is the very back of the box so that that that disconnect is less less obvious so let's just see I do want to be piping relatively symmetrically around the medallion so I think my next Center should go right about here with these bigger spaces that are further apart rather I don't have to go every other opening I can go side by side without risk of them bleeding into each other but with the blue ones being so close I did prefer to go every other I think that's all we're going to do that finishes out the Box quite nicely okay now we're ready to start the assembly process I want to start with a lid because I want to give this a little bit of drying time before I start putting borders on it now recall the lid started with a silver piece about two and three-quarters inches wide I then iced it with a little bit of purple icing that's regular royal icing and I'm going to stick this medallion down that started out looking something like this but was also flooded with sugarveil to end up with a piece like that and now I'm just going to stick it down I'm using white glue now so if I get it off-center or want to change its position it's just a little easier to clean up to finish that off I am going to pipe some blue beads around the outer edge and here again I'm using icing a beadwork consistency sugar veil would also be good for this purpose just to trim out this edge I'm getting a little point on these dots but it seems to be dissipating with time which is good because I don't like points the point is an indication that the icing is on a slightly thicker side it could be thinned for this particular task a little bit I always like to start my borders because it's a textured border I need to use a thick royal icing of glue consistency and all my consistency adjustments can be found in the link in my video description here I'm piping with a relatively small close to our tip it's a number 25 at eco tip I believe though again all of the exact tip sizes and dimensions can also be found in the video description and the motion here is clean the tip push forward pull back push forward pull back push forward pull back some people type on turntables this kind of thing but I find them altogether too on steady so I prefer to rotate as I need to one thing in piping these star borders which I haven't been so religious about today is if you do pick up and break make sure you put your tip down at the same angle you lift it off with so the border looks ultra uniform just rotating a little bit can sometimes make it look less uniform I'm going to do the same thing now to finish out the lid around that upper edge and I would often choose the front in the back of the lid to sew my seam is always on the back I'm just going to pipe a little border I think this just finishes off the edge again this is kind of completely optional we are going to proceed to anchor the handle on the top to do that remember we're using this embossed leaf piece for the handle and I'm just going to squeeze in a little bit of white royal icing glue sometimes that's enough for it to stay up and in this case it might be I just might need a little bit more in there I've also paired the tip down a little bit so it fits that hole a little bit better it was a little too wide so I took my paring knife and cut a little cookie off the side just to put a little more icing in there so it makes more contact and squeeze that in there make sure it's looking straight up and down any excess icing that's squeezed up I'll take out with my trusting needle now before it dries do that also on the back and make sure it's just standing straight up and down a piece this small doesn't really need propping it should be good to go okay so I'm back ready to mount this on its little feet that's so you know again an optional step I just think it looks kind of cool so I usually start by getting doing kind of a trial placement of these first picking this up carefully from areas that aren't wet and making sure the feet are extending out as far as I want them and they're really not so I want to get them a little further out that looks pretty good one might be sticking out a little bit too far but we can do those fine adjustments later so now to stick these down just like to put down my royal icing glue on top of these and I'll just set the box right on top of them you also want to check in that trial check that everything's sitting level and that you've chosen feet that are pretty much the same height sometimes just rolling them slightly different thicknesses will cause things not to sit level then I'm just going to place it on the feet look around and make sure all the feet are protruding to the same amount and they aren't so I'm going to take my trusty needle clean it off and pull out this back foot a little bit and also pull out this back foot I'm dead so looking at it front wise it looks pretty symmetric sidewise it looks good turn it around this way it looks pretty decent so I've got the feet on that would just need a little drying time which is why I handle they put it on this cardboard so I can move it around and work on my next box and then when it's all dried and settled just simply put on the lid and you've got a finished cookie box perfect little wedding gift so that's a wrap on these enameled cookie boxes I want to thank Michelle Hester of sugarveil for allowing us to do this collaboration and encourage you again to check out the other seven videos that are part of this special group of videos also too if you're interested in learning more about how to text your dough using sugarveil mats and other types of text or mats I encourage you to check out my upcoming video on that subject where I go into it extensively till next video live sweetly