Popcorn Cookies For Oscar Night!

I made these popcorn cookies (cookie pops, actually) as part of a collaboration with Elisa Strauss of Confetti Cakes. You can see her tutorial on how to make popcorn cupcakes and lots of other fun sweets on her YouTube channel!

Here's what you'll need for this project:

Roll out cookie dough (my Orange Vanilla Spice cookie recipe is available in my tutorial shop)
Round cookie cutter (I used the 2-½" round from this set of Ateco cookie cutters)
Flower cookie cutter
Cookie sticks
Flood consistency royal icing
Scribe tool
Round decorating tip 3
Soft round brush
Alcohol or flavored extract

Colors:

Wilton Buttercup yellow (or golden yellow)
Wilton Lemon yellow

Most of these products can be found on my recommended products page.

As you'll see in the video, I made these cookie pops by baking the cookie stick in a small scrap of cookie dough, baking and flooding the popcorn cookie, then attaching the two pieces together with icing. Normally, I would make the cookie pops by baking the stick in the cookie that I will be decorating (as shown in this lilac cookie tutorial), but that leaves an indent in the surface of the cookie. This solved that problem!

Watch the video below to see how to make these popcorn cookie pops:

Painting with gel paste is very similar to painting with pearl dust for making gold icing. I use Bacardi 151 because of its high alcohol content, which helps to prevent the liquid from dissolving the icing because it evaporates so quickly. Read this gold icing tutorial to learn more about that.

Here's how to make your own popcorn bucket. I got this idea from a post by Hayley Cakes and Cookies about wrapping an empty meringue powder can in pretty paper. The post was on Facebook sometime in 2011, so I don't think that I'd be able to track it down now. Either way, check out her work. She's amazing!

You'll need an empty meringue powder can (or coffee can), scissors, scotch tape and striped paper. This paper is from the scrapbook paper section at Michaels.

Wrapping this can was not as easy as it would seem. I wanted the bucket to be tapered, but the meringue powder can has straight sides. I had to cover the bottom and the back of the can first, because the way I wrapped the paper to create a tapered shape left a lot of the can showing. I ended up using about 1-½ sheets of this striped paper to cover the whole can.

I trimmed the top to be about 2" above the top of the can.

Weather you use a real popcorn bucket or one that you make yourself, you should fill it with granulated sugar to weigh it down. The sugar also keeps the sticks in place so they don't wobble around.