Last year my contribution to Killer Zebra's charity calendar was 'January'. (You can buy the 2019 calendar here, to which I contributed 'August'.) I decided to create one entire scene out of royal icing on a big old slab of cookie. The cookie was pretty much superfluous to be honest. I had great fun spreading stiff royal icing on with a palette knife, and adding texture to the wet icing with sugar. Once dry, I piped the copses of trees and the outline of the hare in liquid royal icing. I painted just a few tiny details for the silver birch bark, and properly went to town on the hare. I l ..read more

Just before Christmas it's the Honeykitten's birthday. Because of this, she often doesn't get the best of cookie sets, as I'm all cookied out from the seasonal orders. It's very unfair. This year I decided to remedy that. As cats are naturally her faourite animals, I made her these three, using gold and silver to add a little winter sparkle. I'm very proud of them. Especially the one with gold eyes - controlling that gold leaf was not easy! I also love the simplicity of the edible silver tabby. The Honeykitten's not that impressed. They don't look exactly like the ones in her books, th ..read more

Just in time for Christmas, here it is, the spicy version of my shortbread style sugar cookie recipe. It's not a tough gingerbread, suitable for construction, it's a delicate, crunchy biscuit, perfect with a rich vanilla icing (or just as it is!) baked long and low until it's crisp. I've swapped out the usual powdered sugar for light muscovado, which is a bit more of a faff, but it makes such a difference to the flavour and colour. You can find my Vanilla Bean recipe here and my Dark Chocolate recipe here! Ingredients: 250g butter 190g light muscovado sugar 1 large egg 2 ½ tsp oran ..read more

Earlier this year I was so excited to receive an invitation to contribute to Killer Zebras' 2017 Cookie Calendar, to raise money for Operation Underground Railroad (rescuing child victims of human trafficking) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness. My excitement stemmed mainly from the fact that I had recently created a set of detailed, handpainted mushrooms based on botanical illustrations, and I was completely obsessed. I wanted to make more! It was September at the time, and my garden still had a late summer feel but there were hints of autumn appearing, with damp days and a few ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of creating a design for wedding favour cookies featuring the bride and groom's two cats. The design needed to include both cats, and room for names and date. The photograph they sent me (reproduced below with permission) inspired me to create a stylised version of the two cats at either end of a window ledge, with hints of sky and trees beyond, leaving a perfect space in the middle for text. I chose one of my favourite plaque cookie cutters (from Truly Mad Plastics) and started sketching ideas. We discussed whether to try and keep the window frames, but I ..read more

I recently had the opportunity to create a set of peacock feather cookies for my step-daughter's wedding. I've wanted to try my hand at these for ages, and thought it would be a doddle. Lovely colours, lots of lustre dust. But actually, when you look at a peacock feather, they're complicated things - a myriad of connected lines, branching out into waving strands, overlaid with 'solid' shapes of gleaming colour which seem different depending on what angle you view the feather from. How on earth do you render this in royal icing without it seeming clumsy? Well, as usual, there are lots ..read more

I recently had a request to create a small set of Gruffalo cookies. It seemed fairly obvious that I should handpaint the designs after the illustrations for the book, but I wanted to make them a little different, or original somehow.   It was when I was considering which cutters to choose for the set that I hit upon the idea of fitting the characters onto woodland themed cutters. Not only would this give the cookies a varied shape, fit the theme, but also, happily enough, allow me to fit them more easily with each other onto the cushion padding for the tin, than if I'd gone with a ..read more

I absolutely love glitter on cookies. When I first started out, disco dust (and glitters like it, such as this) was still being sold as 'edible' and I happily used it (and ate it) in large quantities. Then The Authorities (in the UK) realised that it was, strictly speaking, not an edible product, as it is not digested and has no nutritional value, and therefore couldn't be sold as such. So all the wonderful, glittery products got relisted as 'non-toxic', suitable to be used near food but not in it. Since I'm not about to ask customers to scrape their cookies before eating th ..read more

It's taken a long time to work out how to pack my cookies so they not only survive in the post, but also create the best impression when they arrive. My first attempts were shoddy - I tried to fit as many unwrapped cookies into round tins as possible; I had to hand cut circles of bubblewrap and greaseproof paper to fit; sometimes I tried to stuff in bunches of cookies tied up in bags. I might as well have just tried chucking them out of the front door. Naturally there were breakages, but surprisingly not so many that people minded too much, and they kept ordering, and so I kept experimenti ..read more

Not very long ago, I asked my husband Martin to bring two chocolate biscuits back with him from the kitchen. He brought oranges. Quite apart from being a completely unacceptable substitute, just what on earth was he trying to tell me? I eat too many cookies? I should eat more fruit? He'd eaten the biscuits really quickly in the kitchen so he wouldn't have to share them with me? This was very dangerous territory, so close to Valentine's Day. In the end, I asked the internet whether he deserved a set of Honeycat Cookies or not. And because I asked it on my Honeycat Cookies page, the overal ..read more