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Edible gold leaf

Edible Gold Leaf – Tutorial

A friend of mine recently sent me a gift package with lots of fun stuff for decorating cookies. Included in the box was a bag of gold star sprinkles, a jar of petal dust, a package of mini cutters, and sheets of edible gold leaf. I’d never used gold leaf to decorate cookies before and I was very intimidated by it. Then, Georganne of Lilaloa (who I am super excited to meet at CookieCon!) posted this month’s decorating challenge, which is to add something extra to your cookies. With a few exceptions, I don’t usually decorate with anything other than royal icing, so thought this would be a perfect opportunity to try out the gold leaf.
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For products used in this and other tutorials, visit my recommended products page.Gold-leaf10
The inspiration for this design came from the idea of making a cookie that resembled semi-precious stone jewelry, combined with this summery beach-y theme that I keep coming back to.
I cut my cookies to 1-1/2″ squares for this project. My Orange Vanilla Spice cookie recipe is available in my tutorial shop. You’ll also find lots of useful video tutorials there including How To Make Royal Icing, Flooding With Royal Icing and Cookie Decorating Basics.
The blue color I’m using is a combination of Wilton sky blue with a touch of leaf green and the coral is made with Wilton pink combined with lemon yellow. Start by piping a few sections in blue flood consistency icing and a tip 2. Make them all different shapes and sizes. Fill in the rest with the coral icing.

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Immediately use a scribe tool to swirl the colors around to make a marbled effect. See more examples of marbled cookies in this post.

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Now the tricky part! Make sure that you don’t have any fans or anything like that around when you are working with gold leaf. When I first opened the package, I had my air conditioner on, so there was kind of a breeze around my workspace. The gold leaf almost flew away!
Hold the gold leaf down with a dry brush and use the scribe tool to tear a small piece off of the corner of the sheet. It tears very easily and sticks to everything (except the brush), so the small point of the scribe tool will be enough to tear a small piece off.

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Lay the gold leaf onto the wet icing. By the way, you can find gold leaf sheets at Fancy Flours.

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Let the icing dry for 8-12 hours before handling the cookies. The gold leaf left sort of an indent in the icing, which was unintentional, but I think it adds a neat effect. 

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Have you ever used gold leaf for decorating cakes or cookies? If not, do you think you’ll try this technique? Let me know in the comments and share your creations with me on my facebook page!
Click on the images below for more cookie decorating tutorials                              Brights Beach-Cookie8 Nautical 

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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