How to ice our brand new bird biscuits!

We may be the only people who are excited to be back in office after Christmas as we've launched a brand new biscuit collection, our Thank You Birds biscuit tin.

Inspired by beautiful English garden birds, the collection was designed as the perfect way to say Thank you, and is complete with a garden leaf biscuit that we can hand ice with a personalised message of your choice. Just for our blog readers, we have created a step-by-step guide of how to ice these brand new designs. It features our ‘feathering’ effect, which is one of the most popular skills we teach in our icing workshops.

To get started, follow our easy vanilla dough recipe to make your biscuits, and used bird shaped cutters to get the right shapes. For your royal and line icing, use our simple guide to biscuit icing. You will need green, white, beige and yellow for the flood and brown or black for the line.

Bake your biscuits and whilst they cool, make up your line and flood icing. Then, using your brown line icing outline the shape of the bird’s body and wing. Leave to dry for 5 minutes in room temperature so that the outline hardens.

Then using your flood icing, ice the curve of the birds body with white, then beige, then green. Whilst the icing is still wet, use a cocktail stick to drag the tip through each colour to create the feathered effect. The longer you drag the stick through the wet icing, the longer the feather. You can also create swirls using the stick in a circular motion.

Next, ice the wing with yellow flood icing. Don’t over-fill the wing because you’ll be adding more colours! Ice a line of green flood icing on top, then a line of beige flood directly next to it. Use the cocktail stick to lightly drag through the icing to create the feathers.

Once you are happy with the base design, put the biscuits in the oven on a baking tray, set the oven to the lowest temperature it can go (usually around 50°C) for 40 minutes. Don’t worry, the biscuits will not bake any further, the low heat just dries the icing and creates that glossy, professional look!

Once you've taken the biscuits out of the oven and left them to completely cool, start adding the detail on top. You need to add two feet, an eye and a little beak. Let the line icing dry for 10-15 minutes or until the icing is completely hard.
Send us your photos if you have a go at making these yourself, and if you want some other gifting inspiration why not take a look at our thank you collection.