Marbling & Wet-On-Wet Icing Technique Tips & How-To

Wonderful how-to and photos from sugarkissed.net!

You will need:

• Sugar Cookie Recipe
• Butterfly Cutter
• Royal Icing
• Food Colors of your choice
• Icing Bags or Squeeze Bottles
• Toothpicks
• Food Color Marker (optional)

Instructions:

Before beginning, you may want to use a food coloring marker to sketch the outline of the shapes you want to create on your butterfly cookies. I did this with my first few cookies and then got comfortable with just free handing the shapes. The fact that butterflies are not perfectly symmetrical in nature is the perfect excuse legitimate reason to not make your cookies perfect either!

1. The first step is to use black icing to outline and immediately fill in the body of the butterfly and the shapes on the outer edges of the wings.
2. Then, use two other colors to add dots to the wings. This is a wet-on-wet technique, so do it quickly before the black icing starts to dry.
3. Continue decorating cookies this way, letting at least 20 minutes pass before going on to the next step so that your black icing is dry.

4. The next step involves a technique called marbling. It's a really easy way to create a beautiful design that will give your cookies that "wow" factor. Start by outlining and immediately filling in the bottom section of one of the wings using one of your background colors.
5. Then, while the background icing is still wet, draw a few contrasting squiggly lines and drag a toothpick through the lines at multiple points, creating a marbling effect.
6. After completing the bottom section of one wing, do the same on the bottom section of the other wing. Continue decorating each of the butterfly cookies this way, letting at least 20 minutes pass before going on to the next step so that your bottom sections are dry.

7. To decorate the top sections of the wings on your butterfly cookies, use the same technique you used to decorate the bottom sections. Outline and immediately fill the top section of one wing, draw squiggly lines in the wet icing using a contrasting color (change the arch of the lines to match the shape of the area), and drag a toothpick through the lines to create a marbling effect. You may also want to use the wet-on-wet technique from step #1 to add dots to fill in any blank areas on the wings.

Find more great tips and tricks when using the marbling technique at Julia Usher's Cookie Connection including this great video on the topic of marbling.

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