Celebrate spring with hand-painted watercolor flower cookies. Herbs, fruit juice and plant dyes can all be used as food coloring.
Equipment
- Cookie cutters
- Rolling Pin
- Watercolor paint brushes
Celebrate spring with hand-painted watercolor flower cookies made mostly without the use of artificial dyes and additives. Herbs, fruit juice and plant dyes can all be used as food coloring, and companies like India Tree even make pre-made versions available for purchase. This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the FoodNetwork. There are additional photos and instructions up on their site.
Ingredients
- Pre-made fondant or make your own
- Any kind of flat sturdy cookie. I used sugar cookies. Here's a good recipe from Alton Brown
- 1/2 cup store bought or homemade buttercream frosting to attach the fondant to the cookies
- food colorings see below
- Water for diluting
- Powdered sugar for rolling out fondant
Instructions
- Fondant was rolled onto a smooth, flat surface dusted with confectioner's sugar, then it into circles with a cookie cutter. You can either paint the circles first or attach them to the cookies with a little buttercream and then paint them.
- Herbs, fruit juice, and natural food colorings were used whenever possible. Crushed frozen blueberries mixed with a little water made a very pretty lavender color.
- Watercolor brushes purchased from a craft store were dedicated to only food use.
- It's super easy to make the flower shapes, even if you aren't an experienced painter. The yellow and red flowers are basically just splotches made with a medium (size #8) brush with a small dot in the middle. For the lavender flowers, I made smaller splotches in groups of three with the tip of the brush, then painted on the stems with the small (size #1) brush shown in the photo above. For reference, here’s a link to a bunch of easy water color flower images that I found on Google
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You don’t need to have gone to art school to explore creativity in the kitchen. In my newest Food Network article I show how easy it is to paint watercolor flowers onto cookies using natural dyes and pigments as an option.  http://blog.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/2014/05/how-to-decorate-cookies-for-spring/
