I love, love, love making cookie boxes! They take a lot of time and patience to complete, but they make such beautiful gifts.
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This Valentine's Day cookie box utilizes the wet-on-wet technique to make the rose pattern on the outside of the box as well as on the heart cookies that are inside.
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Here’s what you’ll need for this project. Find these supplies in my Amazon store.
- Roll Out Cookie Dough
- Box Templates (below)
- Mini heart cookie cutter
- Flood consistency royal icing in black, red, pink, light green and dark green
- Medium consistency royal icing in golden brown and black
- Liquid Gold Shine from TruColor LLC (more on this product below)
- Decorating bags
- Decorating tips Wilton 3, PME 1.5, and Wilton 5
- Scribe tool
- Wilton Color Right set
- Crystal Colors dust in Charcoal - In addition to the black color from the Wilton Color Right set, I added black dust to help achieve a very black icing.
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The gold paint that I used in this tutorial is a new product from TruColor LLC, makers of natural food coloring. I visited their booth at CookieCon last September and they generously gave me a sample to try out. As soon as I got home I bought 4 more colors!
TruColor's Liquid Gold Shine comes pre-mixed with organic cane alcohol. I'd never used a pre-mixed gold before and I found that it was a bit too thin for me, but the alcohol evaporates very quickly, so after a few minutes of sitting in the palette it started to thicken a bit.
I kept the leftover gold in the palette to dry completely and then just reconstituted it with Everclear the following day to use it again. Read this post on how to make gold royal icing to learn all about the process and why it's important to use alcohol on royal icing (as opposed to water or other liquid).
You have to work quickly with the wet-on-wet technique in order to get all of the roses finished before the icing starts to crust over. During the dry winter months, I find that I have about 4-5 minutes to work with the icing.
It's definitely easier to work with small cookies like the mini hearts that are inside the box. The sides and lid of the box are about 4-½", which is a lot of icing to manage at once. When working with a larger cookie, I concentrate on the roses around the edges first because that's where the icing is going to crust over the fastest. If you do have some peaks of icing at the end, just pat them down with the scribe tool.
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Pin this project for later!
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Hello! I’m fairly new to cookies, but am already in love with the whole process! My problem that I cannot seem to fix is red royal icing...how do I get a true red and not a dark pink?
Hi Wendy! It can be difficult to make dark icing colors. I recommend using red from Wilton Color Right. It's super concentrated so you don't need to use too much to get a deep shade. Also, make your dark colors ahead of time (at least a few hours but even a day or two in advance) so that the color can darken on its own.
such beautiful work! What brand icing do you use to get such an amazing black?
I would love to buy a couple of these. Do you sell and where are you located
Hi Terri! I ship my cookies worldwide from my commercial kitchen in Kingston, NY (it's not a retail location). Unfortunately the cookie box is too delicate to ship (and I'm booked through February) but please feel free to reach out if you would like a custom order in the future info@sweetambs.com
Hello there! I got both of your classes on Craftsy (or whatever it is called now) and loved them!
I am so glad they took me to your blog.... I have zero experience with decorating cookies, but it's something I intend to play with in the near future, so thank you for all the effort and high quality of your classes!
I will be following your blog...
I'm so happy to hear that! Thank you very much 🙂
Sorry to bother you, but I could not figure out a way to subscribe to your blog, so that I would get notification of a new post? Is that available?
Hi! You can subscribe through Bloglovin: https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/sweetambs-9813327
This way you should receive an email notification when I create a new blog post 🙂
awesome! just did that.... Sorry I missed this somehow
How would you resize the template? I'm currently trying to figure out how to do that, but I'm not seeming to have any luck.
When the print window opens, there should be an option to resize it there. Otherwise you can resize it in a photo editor (like Photoshop or something similar). Send me an email at info@sweetambs.com if you’re still having trouble and I’ll try to help!
Great gift idea ! Beautiful color combination! Thanks for sharing your creations! KEEP THEM COMMING!!!
Thank you so much, Lori!!