Lace Hearts and Bears

Hello Everyone,

Happy Valentine’s Day! This year I wanted to decorate something in pink and brown. Brown happens to be my favorite color, mostly because of coffee, and chocolate, and wonderful dark brown soil which also makes me think of spring and summer. All good things. Pink is a given for Valentine’s Day, though I did make some wonderful purple, blue, and green hearts last year.

Anywho, I’ve had it in my head for a while now to make some sort of lace design for Valentine’s Day. But then I wanted teddy bears with textured fur too. What ended up happening is a bunch of fun doodling and experiments.

For the bears I started by flooding on a heart for the belly and then used a very small star tip to create the fur. I used an icing consistency a little thinner than piping so that the fur would hold shape but also be a little messy. I think maybe next time I’ll try a different tip or make the fur a little longer. Still, they are cute. For the eyes and nose I smoothed out the fur a little to make a flat base before it dried since I wanted them to be a little elevated from the rest of the fur. I didn’t do this for the first one I tried and the eyes just traveled all over through the brown. Melted face teddy bears are not very romantic fyi! This one is better.The rest of the hearts were supposed to look the same, with just reversed colors. As you can probably see, that didn’t happen. I thought I would try the lace flower within a bigger lace design. Fortunately or unfortunately, the flower got really big and took over the cookie. I really like the look of it though. I tried to mimic the style on the other two smaller hearts although they aren’t completely lace-like.Okay, for real this time I was going to make a lace design. But this time I did some research first. You know what I was missing? Symmetry. The key to effective icing lace is symmetry. Thank you Sugarbelle! After that it’s all about adding layers outwards with very simple additions. I definitely will be trying this again. But next time I will draw up some designs first instead of just doodling.Until next time!