hi Julie Asha recipes for sweet life it's almost Valentine's Day and I've got a great three-dimensional Valentine's heart project for you it's three-dimensional and so far it's it's got lots of relief and texture but it's not fully constructed like some of my boxes and bottles and things like that so if you're just easing yourself into 3d this is a good project for you because it doesn't require quite as much construction I've sized this particular heart to be about seven seven and a half inches which fits the top of my heart-shaped boxes which I do in another video but feel free to scale this down if you want to do something faster or up if you want to do something humongous basically what we're headed towards is this sort of vintage style part which involves a lot of different techniques rubber stamped fondant appliques form this lacy border pipe detail along the edges wafer paper bows stamped cookie on the center and then all these flowers around here are all embossed cookie dough not iced just tinted dough embossed and baked in silicone molds and I've got a whole nother video that's going to talk about how to do that this project involves one big cookie the big seven and a half inch art like so it will start with two smaller hearts that are going to form this arrow that goes through it that's optional 1/2 to 3 inch heart that'll form the center piece that'll get sandwiched on top and then anywhere from 13 to 15 other embossed cookies so you could give this as one big special gift to someone you really love another way to present this is to not really stick anything down the way I have here in the way I will on this video but just to arrange it on top of the big cookie all these little decorative elements and then this becomes almost a cookie platter you know people come by and pluck off a flower and just have that until the whole thing is gone so there are different ways to present it and use it we are going to stick all the pieces and so it could be given as one big gift so you want to start with a nice completely dry cookie and again this is I'll have all the dimensions and things in the video description and also on my website and the first step is to get this border down you want that kind of dry before you start putting other things around and I started that process of fondant applique here and I'm going to continue with it along the other edge I've got fondant rolled out already to the number three setting on my pasta machine you could use a pin but I find that I get a nice really uniform thin roll with my pasta machine and I've got self-adhesive type stamp this is one big unit it's a lazy pattern and it mounts itself to these acrylic blocks which is kind of nice because you can see through it and position it much more easily than you can a wood mounted stamp the other thing to notice is I'm not going to be using this stamp just as it appears I'm going to be cutting it up into smaller pieces and piecing it together and so I encourage you to get creative with stamps don't take things necessarily so literally as they might first appear to you because there are other ways to use things I'm going to start by stamping them out and I've just inked this pad it was an unimpaired seen nothing before I applied food coloring to it and this is my red liquid gel food coloring I just inked it before we started the video so hopefully they're still enough on there if there's not will reinker but I've got a whole another video on rubber stamping which shows how I use these pads and I'm just going to press it here lightly into the fondant lift it up I'm going to do a couple more of those just one more I don't really need to react this pad between every single stamp I can usually get away with three or four presses before I need to re-ink it it's a foam pad so it holds the food coloring a lot longer than a felt pad which if felt pad does not and I would probably have to reengage each time I did then break these down into smaller units cutting this is about an inch 7/8 of an inch round cutter from Maya Tico cutter set I'm just cutting this down so I end up with more of a scalloped e border I'm looking to make sure I've got the lacy piece centered and the cutter before I cut and I need about 12 of these to go up each side so I think if I cut out four I've already got three for cutout over here I should have plenty I need four halves and then from here I cut them in half in a particular way so that I have two little loops at the top of each half and as with any fondant applique which is what this is then fondant applique work I stick it down with corn syrup as opposed to thick royal icing glue because it's less likely to show become lumpy you know what the icing underneath it I'd be a little careful about handling the stamp part if you just stamped them because it can smudge I also let the fondant kind of partially dry maybe for a few minutes before I stick them on so they're less stretchy when I try to put them down on the cookie but I'm just gently tacking them down with a little bit of all the way to the edge you can see we're going to come back in with a little dotted border in a second and I'll be wiping my hands a lot in between applications to get corn syrup off of them so I don't get corn syrup on top of the cookie when I press these down I'm just going to continue like so all the way up this side okay I'm ready to put the last piece down and you want to make sure that it's symmetric with the other side and if it's not I have a little extra space here now is the time to move any other pieces over I'm going to slide this guy over a little bit before the corn syrup dries in place and it's also best not to paint over the cookie as I was doing because you can dribble corn syrup on it but rather to have the corn syrup and painting all happening on a side of the cookie so you're not carrying it over the top of it it might seem intuitive but I've made that mistake or and I'm going to have to rotate the cookie towards me to make sure that it's nice and symmetrically applied as viewed from the front okay and then I just want to come down pat any fondant appliques down that might be sitting out from the edge and use your finger or paring knife and I'm going to come back in and just as a frame of reference add some tiny little red dot work along the edge of the scallops and also this white border down at the bottom and again for that any dot work I use icing of beadwork consistent that you'll find those consistency adjustments on my website I'm going to start first with a white no particular reason you could do this in any order so bead work consistency icing is relatively loose forms a nice round bead on its own without a peek I'll just control the size of the dot by how hard I pipe I want pretty big one so I'm going to pipe a little bit longer than I will for the red ones trying to match the size that I've already piped on the other side just think this adds kind of a frilly element to the edge of the cookie on this dark gingerbread it looks nice the doctor will spread a little bit more when they hit the cookies so it's often wise to practice get the right flow and pressure on your work surface before you start in on the cookie to make sure you've got the size you want you can decorate these any which way and again I'm going to remind you not to take this particular design as gospel you know there's so many different ways you could work with embossed cookies and transfers and appliques on top of these hearts to make a really beautiful cookie and I'm going to show you a very different look achieved with just Brant mostly brown gingerbread brown and pink as opposed to the red and white scheme that I've got going here I'll show you that at the very end and you'll see what I mean there's a lot of design versatility this it's most important to know the techniques then you can extrapolate and begin to design freely on your own now I'm going to turn to the red dots and those I want to be much more dainty as you can see from the one that I showed you earlier you'll see I'm working on cardboard so I don't have to handle the cookie by the edge and that's always a good idea because it's easy to mess up these borders look at the big ones down first so they're all the same size it's probably smart thing to do that friend is easier to kind of do all one same size first and then come back and do the other side rather than kind of breaking the flow as you pipe all the way around I like the dots here because it kind of closes off the gaps between the scallops makes it look a little more continuous the border you could do any other kind of edging here you could do the piped little scalloped zigzag edging we're going to got a lot of action going on with the cookies embossed flowers that are going to go in the center so I'm trying to keep the border patterns so what's simple believe it or not now the tiny dots I'm hardly pressing same opening I'm just pressing with a different amount of pressure to get a very different sized dot you could also pipe right down on the cookie itself I've just chosen not to because if I make a mistake with the red on the light pink it's harder to correct and it would be to correct up here next to dark red and also again I'm going to have a lot of stuff coming close to the border so I think the dots are going to show better a little higher up on the fondant itself we've got the fondant border all done I've got all the dot work down now it's advisable to let those dots dry before I start loading all the other stuff on top because it'll be easy to knick those and smudge them so I'm going to go ahead and set that aside and work on the center stamped cookie basically what I'm doing is creating this little bird is going to go sit on the top I've already done one and we'll probably end up using that one but I just wanted to show you how I stamp just a quick reminder of that when stamping cookies I like to do it on a non-skid surface it just ensures less likelihood of moving this cookie and then moving the stamp and smudging the imprint and I didn't ink the pad before I think I do need to re-ink it now because it's been a while since I used it so I'm just putting a little food coloring down on it I don't want to leave it pooled like that or I'll most certainly get too much on the on the pad itself so I'm going to Splott it uniform and I've put my self adhesive bird on here he's a little bigger than the cookie so he's going to fall off the edges a little bit but that's okay we're just going to ink it with these big stamps it's sometimes easier to ink this way so it's up to you so you can see and I am going to wipe off a little bit that I see on the edge that might create a shadow on the cookie and now I want to try to get his tail up in that zone so I think that'll be pretty good they're placing it down pressing pressing pressing pressing harder than you might think the underlying icing is completely dry that's the thing that's most important here because otherwise you'll smoosh the icing and I'm pushing all over the top trying not to move the stamp and lifting up and I've got a nice imprint I had a little heavier application of coloring here which is this was actually actually the same exact food coloring just a little more heavily applied to the ink pad which is why it appears darker once printed and the only difference between these two is I have a little red dotted border around this one that's already dry so I'm going to go ahead and work with this cookie because I'll be able to speed the assembly process up further but that's the basics of stamping on a cookie it's a lot easier to stamp on fondant than it is on a cookie so best to start with these fondant applique pieces first before advancing to cookie and I've got a whole another video on stamping on cookies so we should have a pretty good idea of that should help you out if I didn't show you enough in this video okay at this point I'm going to start just sort of arranging what I want to go on the cookie before I stick anything down and this is going to go in the center as I said and I've got a whole bunch of embossed flower pieces of various colors and I achieve the different colors just by tinting the dough with different types of food colouring red some pink some pink with white food colouring and then pressing the dough into molds like this silicone mold and baking within the mold my other video on embossing cookies will talk about the benefits of in mold versus out of mold baking why you might do one versus the other but in general I prefer to bake in the molds when I can because I can get really crisp final results without the cookie spreading case in point this beautiful red Dahlia like just didn't spread it all because I baked it in the mold normally I might arrange at all get a visual of how it would look and then glue things down but I think I'm just going to go ahead and start straight away on sticking them down because I think I have more likelihood of messing up that border if I I'm in and out of the cookie too much because it's not quite Drive so to stick down again this is a sandwich ink technique using thick royal icing glue nothing more than that and pressing pressing lightly just want to make sure that whatever you're gluing makes contact with the cookie somewhere if it's leaning up against the cookie sometimes you need to paint to get the glue on the outer edge I want a little dimension here so I'm going to do a little bit of stacking of flowers as well the only thing I want to be wary of is my placement of my arrow you know where is that going to be and I want to avoid that area so they have place to put my straw and so the arrow I was nothing more than a straw with cookies stuck at the ends and I like to see I'm just looking at where I positioned the other one which looks pretty good I had it about yonder and I had the other one up here coming off the other end I cut them a little bit shy you'll see I'm just positioning these shy of the fondant so that the cookie can rest on the fondant and meet the straw so I think that'll end up being glued about there so the straw needs to be about a quarter of an inch needs to come off that straw that should be plenty and then this one will sit right about there you can also elevate the straw a little bit with a little bit of fondant which I think I am going to do just so it meets the cookie a little bit better it's more the same height as the the cookie will be when they're glued together like that look a little bit better so now with those arrows placed and straight we're going to let them dry a little bit in place before we put the hearts on I'm just going to arrange the rest of the flowers around here filling in kind of alternating colors and where their big gaps will come in with some smaller beads and a little royal icing roses and kind of fill those in so some of these broken flowers actually work pretty nicely because they can Nestle up against the straw or the edge of the heart and look kind of cute here's a different type I haven't used yet I think it needs a little lift underneath it so I'll put maybe this one there and again you don't have to glue as you go as I'm doing you could arrange them all first make sure you've got them where you want them and then start sticking things down and that's more often what I do now this big cookie leaning I think looks a little little weird because I want to view really nicely from the top so I will stick a little fondant under that to give it a little more height so it doesn't lean so much so he's sticking the blob of fondant down then I'm going to stick a little icing on top of it so the cookie actually sticks to it okay I'm still haven't finished my flowers completely but I want to anchor my hearts they're going to they're going to extend off the cookie so just placed a little bit of glue right at this connection point it will flop off so unless I support it underneath so I've got a little piece of paper towel under there until it dries and I'm going to do the same on this end over here this might not need as much propping because it's smaller and it doesn't it doesn't hang off the end as much there's a little gap there which I might fill in with a bead of some sort towards the end of the process one thing I didn't put on this one that I have put on others let's see if there's room for it are these a little wafer paper bows I think they could tuck nicely somewhere in up here so let's see if we can insert those and once I get them in I'll give you a little bit of a sideline on how I made them I think I like it up here because it kind of connects with the arrow it's almost got the same this ribbon wafer paper almost is the same pattern as the the arrow itself the straw that I use so it kind of makes it visual connection so I think I'm going to stick it up here I'm just angering the bottom with a little bit of icing I remove that rose and that Rose might just fit nicely down here with one or two more flowers these embossed flowers tend to shed a little bit of crumb so this is why I have my brush around just to sweep that off as I said I was going to give you a little sideline on how I made that bow that went on my heart cookie and it's a way for paper bow I've got another video on how to make way for paper flowers and ribbons and may not have covered this particular bow quite well on there so I'm going to do it here basically wafer paper comes pre-printed or not pre-printed this is pre-printed with a pink jam pattern and that's what I used then I use my paper cutter to cut it into slightly less than quarter inch thin strips because I want a really delicate nice looking bow wafer paper is kind of brittle and it can snap and crack if it particularly if it's cold to help give it a little bit bend you can moisten the whole thing with water but you want to be careful with that typically for this bow I just moisten the ends with water so that they can cling to one another and I kind of wrap I just back kind of fold them back on to each other like so and out of a strip that's maybe eight inches long I might get two or three loops depending on how big I make those loops so I'll tend to make the little loop clusters if you will of two or three loops here's another one looks I ripped that one not good let's do another one and then I'll group the clusters together to form a bigger bow you could put them all together but I find I have a little bit more freedom in terms of where I place them on the heart or any other cookie if I do them in smaller clusters here's a nice little unit of three I wanted to attach it to that one I just take a little bit more water and stick them together like so these pieces are a little too big relative to those so make sure you choose clusters that are scaled to one another when you put them together on your cookie but that's that's basically it set it aside to dry and then place it on your cookie I think I've got all the big flowers again I tend to work bigger to smaller so I got the big central heart down and the biggest flower is down and now I'm going to fill in nooks and crannies with smaller elements I've got three D royal icing transfers these little mini roses which I'll talk about how to make in a subsequent video and also just some standard sugar dry J's these are about four to five millimeters so they're bigger than the usual size but they make nice little filler pieces so for instance I want this to form more of a point at the bottom and I think a perfect way to do that is to stick one of these little hearts down rather one of these little roses down here these roses tend to have kind of big tail so sometimes I'll take my scissors and just pair off the tail so they sit a little flatter to the cookie you can also do that on a grater stick one more pink flower I think up here but let me see what it looks like well it covers that one too much I think I'll tuck it in underneath the bow a little bit I think everything's glued down I might need a little bit more glue there and then a few little red beads I think I think these look as nice as centers and these bigger flowers no rhyme or reason for where these are going necessarily and also fill in this zone with a bead one thing I do want to do is close off the blunt ends of this straw here just don't like seeing that cut end you could also pipe some red dots there which is what I think I did on the other one I guess I don't mind it so much at that end so I'm going to leave it when I pipe these heart pieces before they were outlined and flooded and at the intersection points like here here here and here they don't look as neat as I would like so I'm just going to pipe a nice big dot there to conceal that intersection looks pretty nice up here and then tiny white ones there there and there and I think that completes this particular red and pink Valentine look using a lot of different textures achieved through different types of appliques both fondant stamped fondant appliques realizing transfers and then embossed cookies I would now set this aside to dry before it attempt to move it onto a plate because some of those pieces are still particular the arrow pieces are still needing some drying time we're going to put it over there and before I break I want to show you as I said a different style achieved through all the same basic methods but some different shapes were used and some different colors were used and you can get a different looking effect I like this one I think it's even more vintage looking because it's so antiqued so for instance here I really didn't tint much of the dough this was just naked gingerbread which I then sprayed or sponged with gold luster in this case where the flour is completely gold it was sprayed in this case where the center heart just has the relief in gold it was sponged with gold luster just to get those high points same thing with the top and bottom of the arrow so again use your creativity understand the basic techniques that's the most important thing and then start applying them to create your own unique designs Tim Lex video live sweetly