How great is this Valentine’s Day cookie wreath…

I saw this original Christmas cookie wreath Marcela M from The Celebration Girl created, and of course I thought it was the coolest thing.

So I asked Marcela if she’s be willing to put together a tutorial for a Valentine’s Day cookie wreath, and she so kindly agreed. So below is Marcela’s tutorial….

Thank you very much, dear Jillian, for inviting me to post this tutorial in your blog.

This cookie wreath takes a little bit of time but is very, very easy to do, and it is an original way of presenting decorated cookies.

In order to make it, I used different cutters.

The light blue cutters, including the circles with which I formed the wreath are part of a set I bought at Ikea.

I also used heart shaped cutters, that I had bought a long time ago and a bow shaped cutter.

In case you want to do this cookie wreath and, since I know how hard it is to find a variety of cookie cutters in some  countries, I have made a template of the different shapes, so that you can print them and cut.

For the wreath itself, you can draw two circles of different sizes, according to your needs, cut them and use them to make the wreath. The biggest circle I used was equal to a 9 inch pan (20 cms).

I made this wreath out of chocolate cookies, because I like how chocolate cookies taste with royal icing, but it can also be made with sugar cookies or gingerbread cookies.

Use your favourite rolled cookie dough. For the royal icing, I used this recipe from Sweetopia.

For the wreath, you will need:

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F or 150 degrees C.

Roll the cookie dough about ½ cm and cut the cookies. Place them on a baking sheet covered with baking paper and put them in the freezer to chill for about 10 minutes, so that they keep the shape.

Bake the cookies. Once they are ready, remove from the oven and let cool completely.

Transfer the wreath to the serving plate. The reason I recommend doing this is that, once decorated, it will become too heavy to transfer and it may break. It is therefore better to transfer it at this stage to make sure that it will remain intact.

Prepare the royal icing. Color it as desired and thin to the adequate consistency (I use the 20 second rule, which means that, if you draw a line with a knife on the royal icing, it takes 20 seconds for the line to disappear). Once the royal icing is ready, put it in piping bags/squeeze bottles. You are now ready to decorate!

Prepare your “decorating station.” I like to have all material at hand: cookies in cookie sheets,  a variety of sprinkles and sanding sugar, plates covered with parchment paper for applying sanding sugar, as well as the piping bags and an extra plate.

As you can see from the wreath, I decorated the cookies in different ways. I left some cookies really simple, with only one colour and no further details, and for some others I used other techniques.

I will now walk you through each of them:

For the simple cookies, I just outlined the cookie and then flooded immediately. I then shook it a bit, to even out the icing, and let it dry for 12 hours.

For the cookies with hearts, I outlined the cookie in the base colour and flooded it.

I shook the cookie, and once the icing was even, I piped dots in a different color. I then took a toothpick and traced a line going from the dot’s top to bottom…and a heart shaped appeared. I did this with all dots and then let the cookie dry for 12 hours.

For the cookies that have a single heart in the middle, I just added a heart-shaped sprinkle right after flooding.

For the cookies which have a border with sanding sugar, I first iced them as in the case of the simple cookies, and let them dry for 12 hours. After they were fully dry, I outlined them with royal icing, then immediately poured sanding sugar on top. I let the sanding sugar set (for about 30 minutes), then turned the cookie upside down to remove any extras.

You could use nonpareils instead of sprinkles using this same method.

I outlined some cookies with heart shaped sprinkles. In this case I proceeded just as in the case before, outlining the cookies after they were fully dry, and adding the sprinkles to the outlining icing.

For the wreath, I proceeded as with the simple cookies, but I let this one dry for 24 hours to make sure that the icing would not suffer any damage once placing the rest of the cookies on top of it.

After all cookies are decorated, you can start playing with them on top of the wreath, until you find a combination that pleases you. You can combine large and small cookies and stack some on top of the other, or combine a variety of small cookies.

Once you find a combination that you are happy with, glue the cookies to the wreath with royal icing. Let the icing set for 12 hours and your wreath is ready!

If you have extra cookies, you can place them in clear bags, tie them with a pretty ribbon, attach a couple of cute straws and give them as presents!

I hope that you like this tutorial and, please, do not hesitate to contact me by leaving a message in this post or contacting me at The Celebration Girl if you have any questions about the process or if you need any clarifications. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Thank you again, Marcela, for showing us how to make this incredible treat!!

Btw, here’s the template. Click to enlarge.