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Butterfly Cookies!

Butterfly Cookies (and how to create a bokeh effect with royal icing!)

I thought it would be fun to experiment with creating a bokeh effect on these butterfly cookies (if you’re not familiar with bokeh, you can see some examples here). I studied a few images and zeroed in on the features that I thought would capture the overall feel of a bokeh background. I love how these turned out!

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butterfly-cookies

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Here’s what you’ll need to make these butterfly cookies:

Colors: All of the icing colors were made using the Wilton Color Right color system 

  • Teal = blue + yellow
  • Purple = teal + pink

To create a bokeh effect on your cookies, you’ll need 4 shades of teal (or any color you want to use for the background) plus white flood consistency icing. Each of these bags is fitted with a Wilton tip 3.

 bokeh-bags-reszied

Begin by flooding a square cookie with the darkest shade of royal icing. bokeh-1-resized

While the icing is still wet, pipe dots using icing that is one shade lighter. Overlap some of the dots.bokeh-2-resized

Use one shade lighter to fill in the areas where the circles overlap.  bokeh-3-resized

Continue piping layers of dots with the lighter shades of teal icing. Use the white icing to fill in the areas where the lightest circles overlap. Allow the icing to dry completely (I usually allow my icing to dry overnight, but 8 hours should be enough).bokeh-3-resized

To complete the bokeh effect, use a soft brush to create circles of light blue pearl dust.bokeh-4-resized

Trace a butterfly cookie cutter with the scribe tool so that you scratch the outline into the icing. Fill it in with purple flood consistency icing and a tip 2.bokeh-5-resized

Pipe a staggered bead border with white stiff consistency icing and a tip 3.bokeh-6-resized

Dust the edges of the butterfly with the same blue pearl dust that was used earlier.bokeh-7-resized

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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