Supplies:
For the cookie:
- A dough colored polymer clay—if you have some premade in this color, definitely feel free to use it! You can also mix some up with white and smaller amounts of brown, yellow, and orange.
- Roller
- Small dotting tool (not shown)
- Exacto knife
- Toothbrush (one that is specifically for crafting/polymer clay—do NOT use one that you’d brush your teeth with)
- Chalk pastels in a yellow, orange, and medium brown
- Small fluffy brush (not shown)
For the frosting
- Liquid clay (I like to use TLS (translucent liquid sculpey))
- Chalk pastels or powder pigments in the colors you want. For this galaxy cookie, I mixed up black, blue, purple, pink, and white.
- Silicone tipped tool (or needle tool or toothpick will work too)
Step 1: Prepare your cookie
To start this project, we’ll need to roll out our dough-colored clay to about 1/4″ thick or your desired cookie thickness. We’ll cut our cookie(s) out of this piece.
Step 2: Cut out your cookie
If you have a knack for cutting out shapes, cut away! I like to use a really small dotting tool to lightly trace a path in the clay so I can plan my shape before cutting.
Once you’re happy with your path, you can use the exacto knife to cut everything out!
Originally, I wanted to create a really cool dragon cookie (and maybe I will someday), but I decided to take it down a notch and use a shape of a cookie cutter that we used when making Christmas cookies: a heart.
Tip: If you have cookie cutters DEDICATED to craft use only (not for food), you can use those to make perfect cookies! I struggle with making things symmetrical, so if this is something I were to do more often, I would definitely get a set of basic shapes to use so I wouldn’t have to eyeball, trace out, and retrace every time.
Step 3: Texture
To create the texture baked cookies have, you can use a toothbrush and tap it along the surface of the clay. Pay attention to the edges around the cookie as well, as those can be harder to texture.
Since the majority of the cookie will be covered with frosting, you only need to texture the parts of the cookie that will be showing.
Step 4: Add shading
Baked cookies have a very dimensional color along the edges of the cookie, with the color of the “dough” still visible underneath. To achieve this look, it’s best to layer chalk pastels. The most noticeable color is brown, but I like using yellow, orange, and brown, working my way from lightest to darkest, to build that depth.
Again, with the majority of the cookie being covered with frosting, you only have to shade what will be visible. I left about 1/4″ border of exposed cookie, so I shaded a little more than that to make sure I wouldn’t have any bare patches.
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- After yellow
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- After orange
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- After brown
Tip: If you’d like to turn this into a charm or an ornament, now is the perfect time to add your finding. I cut and roll wire to create a little loop that can be inserted into my creation, but you can use whatever you have on hand!
Step 5: Mix up frosting
Traditionally, polymer clay frosting is a mixture of liquid clay (in my case TLS) and clay. I decided to only use TLS and chalk pastels/powder pigment to color it. This gave it more of an icing texture and made it easier to blend the colors for the galaxy affect.
I chose to mix up black for my background, and then pink, white, blue, and purple for the galaxy. You could definitely do a pastel galaxy too!
Step 6: Frost the background
I was worried that my frosting wasn’t going to be opaque enough, so I added a layer of the black frosting to my cookie. This is just a base for our galaxy affect, and especially with how thin these layers are, it helped bulk up my frosting layer a little bit too.
In fact, you could do a couple of these layers if you wanted to build it up!
Step 7: Bake
Now it’s time to give this cookie a good bake to set up that liquid clay. I put mine in the oven at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.
Step 8: Frost the galaxy
For the galaxy part of this cookie, you’ll need all of your frosting colors. I use my silicone tool to drip these colors onto my cookie in a semi random manner. Some of the colors overlap, others are completely surrounded in black.
When you’ve filled the entire space, you can also go back and add colors on top where you think it’s needed.
Step 9: Swirl
Using the silicone tool, drag the tip through your colors to give it a swirl look. This will blend everything together but still keep the colors distinct.
Step 10: Bake again
Bake again at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.
Optional step: Add stars
To complete the galaxy look, you can add some white stars! You can splatter paint onto your piece like I did for these galaxy resin charms. You can also add these with various sizes of dotting tools and a small paint brush.
I like to paint a couple of line stars that are the biggest, use a decently sized dotting tool to create the medium stars, and a tiny dotting tool to create clusters of small stars.
And there you have it! Your own faux galaxy cookie that can be used for all sorts of decor or as additions in bigger sculpts.
