# Cookie Decorating For Beginners: Create Incredible, Edible Art - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/cookie-decorating-for-beginners-create-incredible-edible-art/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Food & Drink · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Cookie Decorating For Beginners: Create Incredible, Edible Art Updated August 2026 Laurie Shannon Aka Icing Artist · Baker and YouTuber Beginner · 66 min A 66-minute crash course that turns cookie flooding fear into four repeatable techniques you can layer into any design. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcookie-decorating-for-beginners-create-incredible-edible-art%2F746495055) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Cookie Decorating For Beginners does exactly what its title promises and nothing more, which turns out to be a strength. Laurie Shannon, who runs the Icing Artist YouTube channel, builds the class around a simple premise: cookie decorating is not a large collection of unrelated skills but a small set of core techniques that get recombined into increasingly elaborate designs. The 66-minute runtime is split cleanly into a fundamentals block and an application block, and that structure is the course's clearest asset. ## From dough to flooded canvas The early lessons move fast through practical basics: rolling dough to an even quarter-inch thickness, cutting with metal cutters versus paper templates, and cleaning up the "sad edges" left by cutting. The most useful piece of instruction in this stretch is the icing consistency test, dragging a tool through the icing and counting fifteen seconds for the lines to melt back into a flat surface. It is a concrete, repeatable benchmark rather than a vague "add water until it looks right," and it underpins every technique that follows. The flooding lesson itself teaches a specific hand mechanic, hovering the piping bag above the cookie and letting icing drop rather than dragging the tip across the surface, which directly addresses the shaky-line problem beginners tend to hit first. ## Layering techniques into real designs From there the course builds outward: sectional flooding for two-tone cookies, wet-on-dry for crisp layered designs that need drying time between steps, wet-on-wet for marbled florals that must be finished before the base layer crusts, and stenciling with both a handheld approach and a magnetic holder. Edible markers round out the technique list as a low-stakes way to add detail without more piping. Each new technique is explicitly framed as a variation on flooding, which reinforces the "few skills, many outcomes" thesis rather than presenting decoration as an ever-growing checklist. The back third applies all of this to three themed sets, food-shaped cookies, wedding cookies, and winter designs, and this is where the course earns its keep. Watching a snow cone cookie use sectional flooding plus coarse sugar timed to an eight-minute tack window, or a mason jar cookie combine a handheld stencil with hand-piped florals, makes the earlier lessons click into a workflow rather than staying isolated demonstrations. The rustic naked-cake cookie, made by roughing up a scraped layer of stiff icing with a spatula, is a nice example of a technique that looks advanced but is genuinely simple. The course's limits are mostly limits of scope, not execution. Recipes are handed off to supplementary notes rather than taught on screen, so bakers starting from zero on dough or royal icing chemistry will need to lean on those materials. There is no instruction on freehand figure piping, airbrushing, or more advanced structural cookies, and viewers already comfortable with flooding and stencils will find little new here. The pacing also assumes a fair amount of patience with drying times between layers, which the class acknowledges but cannot compress. As a beginner on-ramp, though, it delivers. The techniques are genuinely transferable, the consistency benchmark alone is worth the runtime, and the three project sets give newcomers a template for turning basic skills into cookies that look considered rather than amateur. The standout The 15-second consistency test gives a concrete, repeatable way to judge royal icing thickness, which is the single skill that makes every other technique in the course actually work. ## What you will learn - · Mix and test royal icing to the '15-second' flooding consistency - · Flood a cookie cleanly with a hover-and-drop piping technique instead of dragging the tip - · Execute wet-on-dry layering versus wet-on-wet marbling and know when to use each - · Use a magnetic stencil holder and a handheld stencil for clean repeatable patterns - · Add texture with coarse sugar, edible markers, and multi-bag swirled piping - · Build three full themed cookie sets (food, wedding, winter) by combining the base techniques Best for: A total beginner with no cake-decorating background who wants a fast, low-equipment path from plain cookies to presentable themed designs. Skip it if: Anyone who already floods and stencils cookies competently and wants advanced piping, airbrushing, or figure-piping skills. Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Clarity of Instruction Audio & Video Quality [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcookie-decorating-for-beginners-create-incredible-edible-art%2F746495055)