Last year my contribution to Killer Zebra’s charity calendar was ‘January’. (You can buy the 2019 calendar here, to which I contributed ‘August’.)
I decided to create one entire scene out of royal icing on a big old slab of cookie. The cookie was pretty much superfluous to be honest. I had great fun spreading stiff royal icing on with a palette knife, and adding texture to the wet icing with sugar. Once dry, I piped the copses of trees and the outline of the hare in liquid royal icing.
I painted just a few tiny details for the silver birch bark, and properly went to town on the hare. I like this frosty scene, but felt it needed something to make it more vibrant and striking. There’s an old pack of gold fondant icing in my larder, that’s been waiting for me to find a use. I rolled it out really thinly, cut leaf shapes with my cookie cutters and bent and shaped them by hand. I let them dry overnight in the dehydrator to hold their shapes, then liberally dusted them with autumn leaf coloured lustre dusts, then piped the edges with a little white icing before dipping gently in granulated sugar. These I kept seperate and moved around to try different effects in the photos, seeing as this project was about the end photo, to be sent for inclusion in the calendar. But I like the effect of the leaves – they make a very simple decoration for a birthday or christmas cake.
Happy 2019 everyone
