Icing Techniques - Marbling

                According to Galen Berry, a professional marbler, “Marbling is the art form of printing multi-colored swirled or stone-like patterns on paper or fabric.” Although, as marbling has become increasing in popularity, people have begun to get extremely creative with marbling different objects.

Water-marble Mugs

Water-marble Nails

These are just some examples of how people have taken the concept of traditional paper marbling and turned them into some pretty cool projects. 

In my book, Edwards includes a section on creating a marbled look on your cookie, which she uses several time throughout the book in her designs.The procedure is fairly simple, to begin, Edwards says, “Outline two or more cookies and then thin out two (or more) colors of icing for flooding” (Edwards 18). The purpose of having to use multiple colors when marbling is so you can easily swirl and manipulate the icing to achieve your “marbled” look.

The first cookie I did, I used white icing to outline and flood the cookie and an orange color for the marbling. As I was flooding the cookie, I immediately noticed I overfilled it. The icing was barely being held in by the outline I piped. I continued anyway and added orange lines across the cookie. Then, using a toothpick, I ran it up and down the cookie, vertically crossing the lines I made with the orange icing. It looked similar to the picture in the book, so I set it aside to dry. When I came back 5 minute later, the icing had spilled over the cookie in four different places and the marble design was nonexistent.

Although, now that I had gone through the procedure once and understood how easy it was, I decided to try it again. I tried the white and orange again, but in an attempt not to overfill it, I did not fill them up enough and you could see part of the chocolate cookie underneath. My next attempt, I used white and purple. The design came out nicely, but the border was a bit messy. This was because I felt the need to keep reinforcing the edges of the cookie to make sure nothing went over. My last design I think came out the best, I used white icing for the outline (which I did for all the cookies because I only had one piping bag and was too lazy to take all the icing out and tint it) and pink and purple icing for the marbling.

Do you have any tips on flooding cookies so I can get results that are more consistent?