Yay, My First Order! (part 1)

Lol...I officially have my first order...from of course my best of friend, Crystal. We have been friends since we were 6 and I can proudly say she is my first official order and I couldn't be happier! She even emailed me her order, I love it! Anyway, her Papa is having a glorious 90th birthday coming up at the end of March, so what better to share at a 90th birthday party than cookies?
Her mom came up with this great idea of doing pelican cookies, which let me tell you they have some adorable pelican cutters! So I ordered one right away as well as a cute scalloped rectangular cutter as she wanted something that said a happy birthday message. Since I have a couple of weeks, I figured I would practice a little so that I knew exactly what I wanted to do when the time comes!

To practice, I traced my cutters onto parchment paper and used the color flow technique to just get the design down (no need to practice on actual cookies when you can do just about the same on parchment). I made a mini batch of royal icing and colored it with minimal color, just to get a general color scheme. When practicing, you don't want to use up all of your supplies! 

So here are the pictures of my practice work... 

 

Here are the things I will modify:

With the rectangular cookies, being that I was doing it pretty quickly, I did not allow the icing to set before piping the wording on, so when I do them for real, the base icing will be completely set and therefore the wording will look raised and much more defined. I will also allow each of the colors to set so they are not bleeding into one another. Basically everything will look sharper and much more defined. The other difference is when you pipe onto parchment, it is not quite as full as it will look on the cookie. Finally, the colors...the brown will be a richer, darker brown, and the blue a more navy blue. I will be dusting both with luster dust, brown and blue, respectively. Which will jazz it up just a bit!

With the pelican cookies, I will obviously be using orange for the feet and beak area, I ran out of icing with my mini batch of royal so I just used the brown from the boat. I thought the black wing area would make the pelican look more real, but I am not necessarily sure that it adds that much, they are pretty cute without! I think a little luster dust will be in order as well, just to make them that much more special. If you can't tell, I love luster dust! 

So tell me what you think! Do you think these are 90th birthday suitable?!?! Happy baking...happier eating! Stay tuned for part 2 toward the end of March!