Blog: Techniques

In Julia’s opinion, understanding techniques is the best way to advance one’s baking and design skills. Forget about replicating others’ sweets. Practice the foundational recipes and decorating techniques explained in this section of the blog, and you’ll soon find it easy to develop and hone your own personal style of sweets.

Julia M. Usher

Alcohol- vs. Water-Based Airbrush Coloring

Having trouble with airbrush colorings being too wet and pooling on your stencils, or with white coloring being spotty and see-through? If so, this video has some solutions for you! In it, I distinguish between water- and alcohol-based airbrush colorings and reveal

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Julia M. Usher

How to Adapt Cookie Dough for 3-D Projects

Hi, everyone! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked if gingerbread is the only cookie dough that can be used for 3-D projects. Or why some doughs crack and spread, and others don’t, when baked over curved

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Julia M. Usher

Mass Production with Layered Cookie Stencils

Once I began using lots of colors with my new Prettier Plaques cookie stencil sets, I also started to get lots of questions about how to apply multiple colors with maximum speed and efficiency. After all, time is money, and even a

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Julia M. Usher

How to Melt Chocolate Without a Microwave

This week’s video is pure technique, folks! Because my chocolate lace and doily videos stirred up so many questions about how I melt and handle my chocolate, I decided to answer you all with a video! In addition to covering how

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Julia M. Usher

Molded Cookies 101

Lately I’ve been on a molded cookie kick! Did you notice?! I’ve been using these lovely textured cookies left and right on so many of my cookie projects that I thought it was high time to REALLY explain how I

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Julia M. Usher

Seven Steps to Flawless Rolled Cookies

Any cookie decorator knows that a decorated cookie is only as lovely as its underlying cookie “canvas”! In this video, I reveal my seven steps to flawless rolled cookies, including how to cut to minimize distortion and bake for even browning.

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Julia M. Usher

How to Rubber-Stamp a Cookie

Today, I’m releasing one of the original videos in my 16-video decorating techniques DVD, which was discontinued last month. I’ll be migrating a select number (no more than half) of these videos to YouTube over time. My app (available for

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Julia M. Usher

2-D Royal Icing Transfers – Part 2

More royal icing transfer-mania! In a recent video (in the “Also See” section, below), I showed you how to make basic round and oval transfers for placing, piecework-style, on cookies. In this video, I show how to make more complex traced

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Julia M. Usher

2-D Royal Icing Transfers – Part 1

If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve had transfer-mania lately. My cookie perfume bottles had them; so did my cookies necklaces; and so will the cookie tiaras that I’ll share next week. So . . . what exactly are transfers and how

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Julia M. Usher

How to Stencil Contoured Cookies

I’m pretty excited about this video, folks! I dare say, I’ve come up with a new (at least to me) cookie decorating technique! As you may know, I’ve been playing with lots of curvy cookies lately, but the challenge is always

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