Meaghan Mountford has been a professional cookie decorator for over a decade. Mountford’s cookies have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Modern Bride and Chocolatier magazine. She is the edible crafts editor at the popular website CraftGossip.com, and her blog, The Decorated Cookie, has been featured on hundreds of sites, including Saveur, Bright Ideas, The Hostess with the Mostess, The Kitchn, Readers Digest, and MSN. Visit her at TheDecoratedCookieBlog.com.
Recipe ingredientsAlmost every recipe ingredient should be available in your supermarket. The exceptions—meringue powder, candy melts and glycerin—should be available in the baking aisle of any craft store. Check the Resources for stores and online suppliers.
Baking soda and baking powder. Both are leavening agents, and baking powder contains baking soda, but even so, don't mix these up.
Butter. Use good-quality, unsalted sticks of butter. But if you accidentally bought salted, you'll be fine. Just reduce the salt in the recipe a smidgen.
Cake flour. The recipe for petits fours calls for cake flour. Cake flour has a lower protein content than all-purpose flour, which means it produces less gluten and makes for a smoother, more tender cake.
Candy melts. These are also known as candy coating, wafers or confectionary coating. Of a similar consistency to chocolate chips and shaped like a disk, candy melts melt smoothly to easily coat sweets. Candy melts come in a variety of flavors (chocolate, peanut butter, vanilla, butterscotch) and colors (white, brown, green, orange, pink, red, purple, black, yellow, blue and more). You'll likely find the Wilton brand in the craft store. Other brands, available in specialty stores and online, include CK Products, Make 'n Mold and Merckens. Check the Resources for tips on where to buy.
Chocolate chips. To melt chocolate, chips are the easiest. Semisweet and milk chocolate are used here.
Clear vanilla extract. If it's not in your supermarket, find this in the craft store or specialty stores. This is handy when making fondant and icing as the color stays a purer white. You may use regular vanilla extract in recipes calling for clear vanilla extract, but you will need to add additional white food coloring if your decoration requires white fondant or icing.
Confectioners' sugar. Confectioners' sugar is also known as powdered or icing sugar. Choose the larger, two-pound bag, as you will use quite a bit of this. If you use organic sugar in recipes for icing or fondant, note that it is not bleached, so your icings will have a brown hue. Simply add additional white food coloring to brighten the icing or fondant.
Eggs. Crack open the large ones.
Flour. Unless otherwise noted, use all-purpose flour.
Fruit preserves. You may brush petits fours with fruit preserves between layers, or coat the tops and sides to enable fondant to adhere when covering petits fours.
Gelatin. Available in the supermarket, this is used to make homemade rolled fondant.
Glycerin. A sweet, clear, viscous liquid useful to prevent icing from drying out, this is used to make homemade rolled fondant. Find it in the craft store.
Granulated sugar. Standard table sugar will do.
Light corn syrup. This is an ingredient in royal icing, fondant and candy clay, but it also makes a great "glue" for edible crafting.
