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My New Cookie Studio! - SweetAmbs

My New Cookie Studio!

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After 6 years of renting workspaces and moving from Kingston to Saugerties to Cornwall to Beacon and back to Kingston I finally have my very own cookie studio! Having a home studio was something that I thought about from time to time, but I loved having a place outside of my house to go to work during the day. That all changed when my daughter Olive was born in late 2016. I suddenly felt very strongly that I wanted to consolidate my life and have everything in one place.

My husband and I thought about moving to a larger house so that I could have space to work and we spent several months last year searching for a place. We had two deals fall through one right after the other and it didn’t take long to realize that it was a blessing in disguise.

We really love our current home and the location, but it was just too small to accommodate our growing family and my workspace. So, we decided to build an addition!

When it was finished, I made these cookies to give to the architect Michael Lockwood who designed a beautiful space that matches the existing 1915 house and yet feels so open and modern, and to the builder Dynamism LLC who worked with us to make it exactly what we wanted and constructed the whole thing from the ground up in less than three months, and to my dad who contributed the deck material (I didn’t know I needed an Ipe deck in my life until now) and moulding from his woodworking business Spiegel Architectural Woodworks. The cookies match the back of the house, which is where the addition was built. Scroll down for the tutorial!

I used the architect’s drawing as my template and an edible ink marker to outline each section. Of course I used my favorite cookie dough – flavored with orange zest, vanilla bean, and cardamom. Find the recipe in my tutorial shop and in my book, Cookie Art.

I iced each section in flood consistency royal icing and let it dry before icing the next. It was not easy to match the peachy color of the exterior paint (this color was here before we bought the house, one day we’ll paint the whole thing gray with white trim!). This color is a mix between pink, yellow, and brown from the Wilton Color Right set.

Once the icing dried, I painted the details with a mixture of edible color dusts and Everclear (you want to use very strong alcohol when painting on royal icing. Read this for more info!).

I piped the trim and deck with pale peach medium consistency royal icing and a PME tip 1.5 (I recently started using this tip and it pipes small details like a dream) then painted the deck with Wilton brown color dust and Everclear.

Since these cookies weren’t being shipped, I was able to focus on the presentation so I packed them up in a window box from BRP Boxshop.

(A tutorial on brush embroidered cookies can be found here.)

I just moved into the studio space last weekend. Have a look!

The vaulted ceiling really opens up the small space.

I had just enough room to keep my curio cabinet and a few of my favorite pieces. My little office nook is behind the floral divider.

Moving from my previous 1000 square foot space in the Shirt Factory (a shirt factory converted into artist studios) to this 300 square foot studio was quite an adjustment, but since I spend most of my time filming cookie tutorials, it’s just enough space to do what I need to do. As for private classes, I can accommodate 2 students comfortably and 3 students not so comfortably 🙂 Find more info about private classes here.

Dynamism LLC – www.dynamismllc.com

Spiegel Architectural Woodworks – www.sawmoulding.com

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.

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