Beautiful bird cookies

Count yourself as a bit of a baking master? Our beautiful bird cookies are a great challenge for anyone looking to show off their skills and impress their judges. A little birdie told us… that there’s no cuter way to top cookies and cupcakes than with a few fondant icing or sugar paste birds.

Getting started

The beauty of this project is that you only need a few bits of kit to get the look – here’s what we used:

Bake your biscuits

Use our Easy-Peasy Spring Bug Biscuits recipe to make your biscuit dough, then cut out your cookies using a fluted-edge round cutter approx. 8cm diameter. Bake as per the recipe, then leave to cool fully before decorating.

To top them off with ‘sky’, roll out the Baby Blue icing on a surface dusted with icing sugar until it’s 3-4mm thick, then cut into rounds using a straight-edged cutter slightly smaller than the one you used for the biscuits. Attach these to the top of your biscuits with a little Edible Glue. Then you’re ready to break out the brushes and start decorating.

The perfect habitat

Your birds will need somewhere to perch… so we treated them to hand-painted branches, some of them complete with beautiful blossom. We mixed red and green food colourings together to make brown, then added a little water to this on a food-safe brush before painting these on to the blue icing rounds. We started off by using a wider brush in a more watered down ‘paint’, and then, when this had dried, added detail on top with a more concentrated mix. Let your branches dry completely before adding any blossom, so that the colours don’t run together.

Gather your flock

Now that their habitat is all ready and waiting, it’s time to make the birds themselves. Take a little modelling paste from the pack, roll it between your fingers to warm and soften it slightly, and mould to form little birds.

To make your birds look as close as possible to ‘real’ ones as you like just mix up your food colourings as you did for the branches to get the colours you want, and then add them with a fine-point brush. Leave them to dry, and then stick them to your cookies, either perched on the branches or flying free across the sky.

Make-to-give magic

Whatever kind of celebration you’re avian (sorry), these little birds can turn their wings to it… they’re perfect for spring and Easter parties, or a Valentine’s or Mother’s Day gift. Any bird-lover would love to receive a batch of biscuits featuring their favourite flutterer for their birthday – or how about robin-topped cookies at Christmas, complete with snow-covered branches?  

Whatever you make, we’d love to see it, so please share your birdie bakes with us on social media and let us know how much they loved them (both before and after they ate them!).

By | 18 January 2022