Hannah and Suruthi make awesome pop art cookies. Every Sunday while gardening, these lovely ladies keep my company via their true crime podcast, Red Handed. So, it’s fun to transform real life icons into edible art.
Start with a Photo
To transform these characters into pop art, search for images that might make good high-contrast images. A little drama doesn’t hurt either.
High Contrast It
Sometimes it’s helpful to use a photo editor to add more contrast to the images. Unless you are decorating with an airbrush, cookie decorating is all about color blocking, making it a perfect candidate for pop art. And by upping the contrast on a photograph, it makes it easier to see how to line the faces and shape the colors. There are lots of free apps to do this for you. I use several, but this one was done with one called Deep Art Effects.
Cookie Outline
There are three main steps to cookie-ing the art: the outline, the flood, and the details. If you can really nail the outline, the rest is much easier. It’s the foundation for flooding the colors, and can be very difficult to change the flood colors after the fact.
Flood and Pop Art It
Once the flooding has dried (I like to dry mine in a food dehydrator because it speeds up the process AND gives it a nice sheen), details can be stippled onto the flood to help guide the freehand piping. Some decorators like to use projectors like KopyKake, but if you don’t have one, this is a good alternative. These images don’t show the stippling, but you can see them in the video above. When flooding, look for ways to add some comic textures. This is easiest to do in the background, but sometimes you can add textures to hair or faces.
Pipe the Details
Then the final and most nerve-wracking part: the details. If you mess up this part, you have to start all over. I used to make numerous extra flooded cookies just in case I royally messed up, but now I just cross my fingers and start over only when necessary. The shadows on the necks didn’t turn out great, but overall I’m happy with the result.
Happy baking, friends!
