Overachiever......ok maybe

Remember that one time when I was telling you about how I love link parties?  Well the last link party I did was for Simply Sweet by Honeybee and Ellie's Bites Decorated Cookies January inspiration challenge.  The title of the challenge is "New Year/New You".  I did these cookies.  I also did yet another link party for Lilaloa.  Her challenge? "Forget about Color".  The challenge was to decorate a cookie in black/white or anything in between.  So I linked up these cookies.

I love to be challenged with cookies.  I have such a hard time coming up with ideas.  So these challenges challenge me into "cookie think".  That's what I like to call it.  

The "New Year/New You" challenge got me to thinking.  I would love to try to perfect my skills with glaze icing and to try adding another medium to my cookies, fondant.  Hence the overachiever in the title.

Since glaze was my icing of choice for this challenge I decided to use my granddaughters 3rd birthday  party to try out my new skills with glaze icing and fondant.

The first step was to create a fondant hot air balloon.  I purchased this fondant mold and started to work. I discovered that I LOVE working with fondant.  It's kinda like playing with play dough.  Once the hot air balloon was made I let it sit out and dry for 24 hours.  Not sure if this is correct, but that's how I did it.  I then grabbed some clear vanilla extract and luster dust and painted the areas that I wanted painted.  Can you say FUN!!!!!

The next step........glaze. I quickly contacted Kim at The Cookie Puzzle for her expertise in the area.  Kim is a all glaze gal and the sweetest person ever to share her glaze secrets with me.

My concern was that glaze sometimes tends to dry with an opaque look.  I did not want this look for the cookies I was working on.  Kim's suggestion was to add bright white coloring to my icing.  Who would have thought!! Such a simple step.  After my icing was colored to white, I separated it and colored it to my desired colors of choice.  I found that this icing LOVES color.  It doesn't take much.

I honestly did not want to totally do my cookie in glaze.  Since I love working with Royal Icing I decided to only use it for outlining and a few details.  I outlined my cookies with bright white Royal Icing.  After the icing dried I painted the white icing with gold luster dust and clear vanilla extract.  I picked up the glaze icing and started flooding away.

Here is the end result:

I have to say, I did not mind working with glaze icing at all.  I found it to be a heavier consistency than what I'm used to working with.  I'm not completely converted, I still like my Royal Icing.  But hey, I got to work with both so this made me a very happy camper.  Infact, I plan on using glaze again when I whip up some baptism cookies for my grandson :)  But Royal Icing will also be involved ;)

Thank you so much Kim, for helping me out with this project.  It was a HUGE success!!!!!