Marbled Ornament: Beginner-Friendly Wet-On-Wet Decorating Technique

Directions

• 1

  Bake and cool cookies before decorating. Try Ann Clark's classic sugar cookie recipe. Make sure cookies are fully cooled. If they are warm, the icing will run off of them. Make royal icing.

• 2

  Prepare the following icing colors:
  
  Detail Consistency:
  White

  Gold (mix a tiny amount of Mocha Brown food coloring into your Lemon Yellow icing to get gold)

  Flood Consistency:
  White

  Red

  Green

• 3

  Outline the round part of the ornament with white detail consistency icing, then fill with white flood icing. Be sure not to fill in the collar of the ornament with white, that will be done in gold.

• 4

  Fill the area you just outlined with white flood. Move quickly to the next steps, as the icing needs to be wet to create a marbling effect.

• 5

  Use your red flood consistency icing to pipe horizontal red stripes into your white flood consistency icing. Leave space for green stripes.

• 6

  Use your green flood consistency icing to pipe green horizontal lines between the red lines.

• 7

  While the icing is still wet, use a sharp toothpick or scribe tool to drag the icing vertically, creating a herringbone pattern. Use a damp paper towel to wipe your scribe or toothpick between each pass. Be sure to drag in the opposite way each time to get alternating "v" shapes. Also, to make the ornament look more three-dimensional, curve your scribe lines to follow the curvature of the ornament.

  Let the icing dry until just crusted over, this can take up to 60 minutes.

• 8

  Now, pipe squiggles along the collar of the ornament, then a loop in gold detail consistency icing.