Jackie's Wedding Dress Cookies

One of my very good friends got engaged a couple of weeks ago and came back with her boyfriend to California to celebrate their engagement as well as her 26th birthday. 

(photo was taken with my phone so please excuse the quality..)

One of the things I made for her were these wedding dress cookies.  In decorating sugar cookies with Royal Icing there are a couple rule of thumbs I keep.  

In outlining, ALWAYS, top to bottom, left to right, stop and start at corners or anywhere there's a break in a smooth line.  In the photo above the first box I did the first line from the top to the bottom of the dress.  Then I did the left side, again, top to bottom.  Lastly, I went from left to right on the bottom of the dress.  For some reason sticking to these rules have helped me to have nice straight lines. 

From there I made another outline on the inside on just a couple of them.

At this point I filled the rest of the dress in with the royal icing leaving the smaller section within the dress open.  After the icing has dried I went back in the smaller area then filled it with more icing then immediately covered that area with crystal sugar.  When you shake off the excess sugar, there will be a portion of the finished dress with a little sparkle to it!

I did variations of this technique with a couple of the dresses.  The rest I filled completely, let dry then piped on top then repeated the covering with the crystal sugar to create accents in the dress.

I decorated these kind of on the fly.  One thing I'm not good at is planning ahead in terms of decoration.  I just kind of go with the flow and hope for the best.  For the most part it doesn't always pan out.  So I very much suggest doing sketches or have a general idea of color scheme and design in order to create a truly gorgeous piece of edible art.