Create gorgeous edible toppers for special occasion cakes with custom decorated sugar cookies made with royal icing! Have you ever needed a stunning cake topper? Using your sugar cookie skills to make a stunning cake topper is a great way to get creative and provide an additional service to your cookie business customers!
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The right topper can take a cake, well, over the top. Yeah, that was bad, I knew it was bad as I wrote it, but I did it anyway. Its true though, a basic cake can become next level and Instagram worthy with the right topper (especially when it's a delicious cookie!).
I'm just beginning to hone my cake decorating skills. I started with sugar cookies, and expanded to cakes later. So, cookie toppers seemed like the perfect way to improve my basic cakes. Below are the three steps I use to make perfect cookie cake toppers!
1 Bake a Lollipop Stick into a Cookie.
Initially, I thought that making a cookie topper would be as easy as nestling the cookie securely into a pile of buttercream atop a cake. When I attempted that technique with my twin boys' construction theme birthday cake. I ended up with a crumbled, buttercream covered cookie (and if we're being honest, a buttercream covered kitchen.)
I realized I'd have to have something to hold the cookie in place, so I ended up using smaller cookies to attach a stick onto my toppers with thick royal icing. The cake turned out fine with the help of many decorative meringues and a few prayers as I moved it from my kitchen to our church fellowship hall. I also learned that cookie cake toppers require a stick to hold them in the cake. So, with this fishing cake, I remembered and baked the lollipop sticks into the cookies.
I use these Wilton lollipop sticks for cake toppers. I cut out each shape from a frozen sheet of cookie dough, then place them on the pan and press the lollipop stick into the cookie almost to the point that it touches the pan beneath, but not quite. The cookie will puff up around the lollipop stick as it bakes and envelop the lollipop stick.
2 Decorate the Cookies
This part is no different than usual. Just decorate the cookie over the top of the baked in lollipop stick as you would normally.
If you're new to cookie decorating and would like to learn more about decorating, check out this free royal icing consistency online class, a sample workshop from my Cookie Classroom program!
If you're worried there might be a noticeable dip where the lollipop stick is baked in, just pipe a bit of icing over it and allow it to crust before flooding. For the fishing cake, I flooded the cookie toppers which had been baked with the sticks inside with white royal icing, then added details like the fishing pole, and the scales of the fish using white royal icing. I painted over these decorations after they dried. If you'd like to see exactly how I painted those, check out this video.
Below are the colors, I used for painting.
3 Place the Cookie Toppers Into the Decorated Cake
After you've covered your cake with buttercream, just pop the decorated cookie toppers into the cake just like you would a cake dowel. You might want to add some swirls of buttercream around the base of the topper to make it extra pretty. I used a petal tip with blue and white buttercream to create the look of waves around the fish and fishing pole.
A few additional notes.....
If your cookie topper is large, you might want to consider baking in two or three lollipop sticks.
If your cake is a bit short, there might be part of the lollipop stick showing, you can just cover that in more icing....more icing always helps
Thank you for reading! You can find more cookie decorating and home baking resources below!
