 Hi again, in this video I'll be talking about basic ribbon work. So how to make fond things that use rolled fondant and chocolate dough. Specifically I'm going to be showing how to make handles which you saw perhaps earlier on my basket cookies. The second item using basically the same techniques with a little bit of a twist. I'm going to show how to make some simple rolled roses that add dimension perhaps to cakes or cookies. These are small scales so they look particularly great on cookies. And the third element of ribbon work, third variation of ribbon work that I'm going to share is these tiny little bows. Also great embellishments for cookies as on this heart. And then while advanced to larger embossed textured ribbons. Again, most of the techniques are similar in terms of the rolling and cutting but I'm going to be introducing slight textural changes and twists in making each of these different elements. First of all, just a little bit of commentary on rolled fondant versus chocolate dough. I've got a whole video about how to make chocolate dough. I love it. And my design preference is to use it on cookies and cakes if I can get away with not using rolled fondant I will most usually use a chocolate dough either a dark one or a white version because if made with a high grade chocolate it is. It sets up rigid when an air dries but as soon as you bite into it it melts in your mouth. So it's just a really great modeling medium that's super super duper tasty. The downside of it is of course it's made with chocolate so it's much more heat sensitive. So if I need to make an object such as these handles for baskets that need to stay rigid always under any temperature or scenario and not flop over then rolled fondant is a better medium because it dries harder quicker and isn't prone to melting certainly if temperatures get above a certain point. For very vertical slender objects I will shape and form basic ribbons with rolled fondant and as I move to elements like these bows that are going to be resting on something so if they get a little soft it's going to be less obvious then my preference is to work with something I consider more tasty which is the chocolate dough. And again refer to my other video for how to make the chocolate dough because it goes into great detail on that subject. I'm going to start first with working with the rolled fondant and do these very very basic ribbons that form these handles and show you how I do that. Fondant is nothing more than a sugar dough and it's got some gums and other stabilizers in it if you buy it off the shelf which is what causes it to set up much more rigidly than the chocolate dough which is a mixture of chocolate and corn syrup and that's it. Now I've got rolled fondant here it's like Play-Doh if you've not worked with it it behaves like Play-Doh. It typically comes white though it can come it can come tinted in various shades of brown and flavored but I'm using a basic white dough here. I've kneaded in to get a blue I kneaded in earlier some blue food coloring I use my same liquid gel food colorings that I used to color my royal icing and I just kneaded in like you would bread dough you know on a cutting board kind of back and forth until the color is homogenized and for that that particular task you might want to use gloves because the coloring gets a little bit can get a little messy. So I'm going to make a blue handle and when I'm doing them you'll notice perhaps you did that these handles are all pretty much the same size and shape and you can eyeball that but if you want to really preserve some consistency of size and shape I suggest making a little bit of a template for these before you get started so that you can size them all accordingly and you can do this various ways but what I did was I shaped a piece of wire into the shape of the handle that I wanted that would fit my basket perfectly and then I simply lay it down on these little cardboard working areas again I like to put work on cardboard for this particular task the way I assembled some of my baskets earlier because once I'm done with this handle I can set it aside and put it somewhere else to dry so it's pretty mobile and so for each of these I took a pen or a marker and traced the outline of this wire handle so I have several little cardboard that I can use so I can make many many of these at one time. This traced mark it's not perfect but it'll be enough of a guide to shape this handle once I get the ribbon cut. Okay so again this is a video on basic ribbon work so all these things I'm going to show you start with a ribbon affondent or chocolate dough naturally how do you get that? Well since I'm making long strips of dough the best thing to do is to start with a form of the dough that's elongated so I'll take my big blob of dough and I'll typically flatten into a long piece and if it's sticky it's a little warm in here today I will dust this surface lightly with powdered sugar but I try to do this minimally because if any powdered sugar remains on the surface it's sometimes hard to get off later once the element dries so I'm going to wipe excess off and for rolling this the first step in making ribbons is to roll it into a flat long sheet and then the second step is simply to cut the ribbons the width you want them and there are certain little tips and techniques for doing that. For rolling you could roll out with a rolling pin I much prefer to use my rotary pasta machine my hand held my hand crank I should say pasta machine because I can get a much thinner ribbon and much more uniform ribbon and I can ever get rolling it with a rolling pin so this is a really handy tool and they're typically pretty inexpensive I think maybe fifty bucks I'm guessing I bought this a while ago so they might be more expensive now so I want to feed this in I want to create a long ribbon so I'm feeding it into the machine lengthwise rather than widthwise and I've got it set on the number one setting they're nine settings on this pasta machine I'm just going to pause here the one is the most open setting they're about an eighth of an inch apart and for the handles I roll it typically to a number three setting which is maybe one sixteenth of an inch thick I like to start most open and then gradually work it through at more close settings so that I don't shred the dough if you try to jam a big blob of dough through a really thin setting you'll end up with a ripped ribbon rather than a nice smooth ribbon normally you would clamp this pasta machine onto your work surface so it doesn't move around it just doesn't fit on my work surface so I'm going to be holding it as I'm rolling and that that can work too okay so this is rolled through on the number one setting about an eighth of an inch thick I want a more delicate ribbon so I'm going to at least take it to two if not three and again these are pretty long pieces so I'm trying to keep this ribbon intact as it's coming through I'm guiding it out on the other end so that doesn't fold back on itself and potentially stick to itself I actually think this is thick enough or rather thin enough for the purposes I want if it gets too thin it's harder to handle in the next shaping process now to cut ribbons you just need a ruler and a sharp-haired knife this one's kind of hanging off my work surface which is somewhat short so I'm just going to cut it so it's a little more manageable and then first cutting ribbons again I want to I lay that in the powdered sugar I'm wiping off extra that I don't need because I don't want it sticking onto this dough roll fondant once it's exposed to air it's going to dry more quickly so you have to work with it more quickly so I'm just going to show you a simple ribbon cut I usually eyeball my ribbons more or less though I use the edge of the ruler as a guide so my first my first step is to create a clean cut to create one side of that ribbon between cuts if there's any fondant or chocolate dough stuck to the tip because this will apply to chocolate dough as well I clean it off because if you have a blob there you'll end up tearing the ribbon on your next cut and then I'm just going to slide this over those those handles were only about an eighth of an inch wide so I'm just going to slide this over about an eighth of an inch I'm leaving this piece of dough intact because I find that if I move it off the cutting board and try to do the next slice the whole larger piece will shift and I'll get a much more wavy ribbon so this leaving that little piece there kind of acts to keep the ribbon from shifting around as I make the next slice I've eyeballed that it's about an eighth of an inch but if you want to be precise you could take your ruler and we'll just do that and we'll mark off I'm going to make it actually closer somewhere between an eighth I'm just going to mark it off here to an eighth of an inch so it's more exact you know if you're not good at eyeballing I'm just making a little notch mark and then I'm going to line my ruler up along those edges and if I wanted to cut a bunch of these at one time which I would recommend because I can get four or five ribbons if not more out of this one piece I'm not going to lift that ribbon up either I'm just going to keep moving this over and cutting so they get the straightest possible ribbon I'll show you in a bit what'll happen if I do lift up that other fondant and try cutting again it may just shift on me so I'm going to make a few cuts in this and here I'm eyeballing rather than marking it because I don't really want that little mark that mark in the middle of the fondant like I have there hopefully these are long enough for these handles I am going to trim these off and just shape one for you this piece I won't need so I'm going to cover that I'm going to roll that up and ball it up and cover it with plastic so I can use it again for something else and this one has a little notch in it which I don't like so I'm going to scrap that I'm going to work with this second one which is much more of a perfect cut I'm going to move this piece aside and show you what happens a bit later when I try to cut that without leaving that dough next to it and now you want to work with this if you're going to shape it into anything bow handle or whatever you want to work with it while it's still pliable so I don't cut too many strips at one time because as I said it will dry pretty quickly and all I'm doing is basically laying it on this cardboard to kind of follow the outline that I drew here before trying to get it as symmetric as possible and then I will trim edges now so they're even because it's easier to trim the dough when it's wet than after it's hardened then it gets more fragile and you're more likely to break it so I think it's not quite symmetric so I'm going to bring this side in a little bit and trim off that end a little bit more and there I've got a decent looking handle so I would set this aside at this point let it dry until I could pick it up as you saw me pick up the other ones earlier and hold it up and up and down and be ready to stand upright in my cookie basket. The other thing that I did to embellish these ribbons is I simply piped some royalizing dots on them after the fondant was dried. So that's a basic straight cut ribbon no texturing to it I'm going to show you what might happen if I attempt to cut a ribbon while moving that extra you know moving moving away that side piece it tends to see more shifting going on so I'll start again I'm holding down also on the ruler to keep it from sliding and to keep the piece of fondant underneath that's secure as I cut. So I've moved that side piece and let's see if I can get a nice and nice even cut. You'll see how it shifted up here at the top it seems to shift more along the whole length of the ribbon and I tend this actually looks pretty good but I tend to get more of a way to cut. So that's straight basic ribbon I'm going to move next I'm going to still work with fondant for these roses that I'm going to do next let me pull another example of those back out. I've got one that I did almost entirely with pink rolled fondant and I've got one here that's got a little pink edge in a white interior I use two pieces of fondant piece them together and roll them through the machine before I cut them. So this is a slight nuance this edge of this is also been cut with a scalloped cutting tool. So again this is a little twist we'll start with the basic ribbon but I'll apply these twists as we go. Okay so I'm going to now to do a ribbon application in a two tone rose and to do that I started as I did before with a blue ribbon in shaping each of these colors into kind of an oblong and one thing I should say about fondant if it comes straight out of the container same thing with chocolate dough if you've made it and it's sat for any a period of time you want to work it in your hands till it's nice and homogeneous and pliable and soft because it can stiffen up in these containers over time. So I've basically just scrunched them together and I'm going to have a kind of a two tone ribbon and to create this little pink edge I'm going to cut just inside of the you'll see but I'm going to cut just along the edge of the pink so I have a little pink edge showing up. You can do a solid color though of course as well. So I'm going to open up my machine again to one rather than trying to jam this through a really tight opening and put potentially ripping it just going to start with the more gradual entry into the device and try to guide it out as it comes out the bottom because if it folds back on itself and if the dough is at all is too soft it will just stick to itself and you won't get a nice long sheet. Now here there's some edges that are kind of rag tag and they can sometimes get caught up in the machine when they go through on the next roll and make my roll difficult so I'm going to pull that off and I'm going to send it through again this time on the two setting and I think for the purposes of these roses I wanted them looking pretty delicate so I took them through to setting three. That's usually as thin as I'll go with ribbons. Okay so I've got that rolled and to get that edge I'm just going to straighten it up a little bit. Use my ruler again as a guide and cut really close to that pink edge just so I get a little bit of a touch of it at the top. Actually I'm going to cut a little bit further away because we're also going to scale up it so I need to leave sproom room for scalping. So let me take that away. Maybe about an eighth to a quarter of an inch away from the pink edge and the piece is that I'm not going to use for this two-tone rose. I can use for a solid rose. I can use the white to make a white rose or I can ball it up and need the colors together and end up with a soft pink that I use for some other application altogether. Okay I leave for this ribbon you can I don't need all this overhang too. I can probably get another rose out of this. I'm going to cut this about a half an inch wide and I can probably get another rose out of this other white piece in a bit. So we'll set that aside. I do want to give it some texture though. I don't know again if you notice the scalloped edge. To do that I use these craft shears. They're really fun for creating scalloped and otherwise wavy kinds of ribbons and they come in all sorts of patterns and shapes but this one's particularly nice for the roses. And so to cut you just simply cut. I don't clamp all the way down. I don't I don't do a full cut. So the tip is always a little bit open at the end because that allows me to scooch the scissor up to right where I left off. So I don't have any scallops overlapping if you will. So I'm advancing my scissor to where I left off before I move it forward again. So there it is in the notch. Lining it up with a notch I just cut and going about it that way. Whoops. That was more or less a full cut. And you see what happens is it creates a flat zones. What's hard for me to get a nice scallop there again without cutting deeper into the ribbon. So that's the reason I try not to completely close the scissor. And I probably have enough for a single rose if not more. So I'm going to stop scalloping there. It doesn't matter that it's not an even, you know, perfectly even ribbon because I'll be pinching down the bottom of the rose so you won't notice that it's wavy on this end by the time I'm done. So to make the rose move it that way. What I do is I start by like turning turning in and end of the ribbon and then I just roll it into roll it around on itself to create this shape. And if I want more slack, the more open rose, I might just give it a little more slack before I pinch in and at the bottom. So I hear I'm getting a little curvy or kind of wavy or looking flower. And you can make these as big as small as you want. Like the larger the ribbon you cut, the bigger the rose you can create. I used to make these in large scale sizes for my wedding cakes when I had my wedding cake business. But I'm making this for a cookie so we're going to leave it pretty small. I think that's actually probably big enough. And so I'm going to stop twisting it and I'm just going to pinch the bottom down. This actually looks a little bit more like a carnation because I choked up on it so much. But that's a nice quick way to make a flower that adds some relief to a cookie when you want a little dimension on top. At this point I'd set it aside then a cutting board to air dry until it wasn't malleable because it's much easier to stick it on a cookie like this with royalizing it without press down on it without misshaping. When the time comes to put it on the cookie and I show this in my video where I make these hard cookies, I would then simply take care of scissors. Now it's air dried and it's not going to misshape on me when I handle it. And I cut off that tail. I can kind of shave it off with the scissors so that the rose lies flatter when I stick it onto the cookie like so. So that's a basic rose or carnation ribbon flower is a way to call it. Okay, so now I'm going to move away from fondant onto chocolate dough. And as I said before, I like to use chocolate dough for ribbon work when the ribbons are just going to be lined flat on something so that if they do soften up when they are served, there's less of a risk of them, you know, you know, you're noticing that they're kind of melty and soft because they're not having to stand on their own for any particular purpose. So for these little ribbons, for instance, on this cookie, I use chocolate dough. And I use the semi-sweet chocolate dough, which is why it's dark. Again, you can make it with white chocolate, which I've shown another video and you'll end up with a nice creamy white dough that can also be tinted in the way that you would tint fondant. So to make this tiny ribbon, it's again, just a, it's really just a variation of what I did for the fondant handle. And I'm going to bend it back onto itself after I cut the ribbon. So I'm flattening it out a bit, adjusting my machine, starting on the number one setting. And this dough is made maybe a week ago. The dough will be quite soft when I first make it, but then as it sets over the course of a day, if it's really cool out, it firms up into this Play-Doh like consistency, more like Tootsie roll actually. And then I can shape and handle it. But I try to handle this even less than I do rolled fondant because the heat of my hands can sometimes soften it and make it harder to work with. With the dark chocolate doughs, I try to use as little powdered sugar as possible. You saw me kind of frantically cleaning off my surface of powdered sugar because it will really show up on this dough because it's dark. So I'm just, so I'm going to clean my ruler for that reason too because it's covered with powdered sugar. And I'm just going to cut, nade them in inch ribbon, the way I cut it for the handle. Same process, do one line, leave the extra dough to the side there. Shift the ruler over. I had a little trouble getting that ruler up off the dough because the dough is sticky to the fondant. I'm going to do a couple of these. If you have to, I lightly dust the back of the ruler when it's sticking to the dough, but I didn't move this chocolate dough all together too much off the cutting board, so I'm not going to do that. And I'm going to press it a little less hard to keep that ruler in place. And that might be enough. Yeah. Okay, so to create these little bow loops, I simply take this ribbon and I form a loop. And then I just kind of keep folding it back on itself until I get enough loops. I'm just doing these half little bows to create bows to either side of the rows on my heart cookies. But if I wanted to create a fully formed bow and I ran out of dough, I could simply take another ribbon and add to this one. I'm going to add another, let's see, I'm pinching at the bottom to keep the dough together. I'm going to add another three or four loops to create a really symmetric little bowlet here. So the different ways you can do half bows or full bows. I really like the look of that at this point. So again, I'm going to pinch off the extra because I can reroll this right away and set this to the side. With this particular bow, I could apply it more or less immediately to the cookie without waiting for it to air dry. Just simply glue it down with royal icing as long as I didn't touch the loops because I wouldn't have shaped them. But because it's not standing on edge and I don't have to apply any pressure from the top to actually stick it to the cookie, it's less critical that it would be thoroughly air dried before I use it. But the chocolate dough will also stiffen when air dried. Here's the bow I did a while back. I can push on it without really misshaping it if I were to really manhandle it. The warmth of my hands would again soften it back up to this consistency, not so with royal fondant. Okay. So the next thing I'm going to do, and the last thing I'm going to do in terms of ribbon work, is I'm going to advance to some slightly larger ribbons that have been embossed. So this one has a particular texture throughout the ribbon itself. I'm going to show you how I do that. And these kinds of ribbons larger are great for cake top decorating. I'm going to be decorating in another video a small cake and I'm going to show you the application of those there when we get to that. So I'm going to reuse this dough. I'm going to set this ribbon off to the side because it is so cute I want to save it for another day. And I'm going to get more chocolate dough in an attempt to do a much bigger kind of bow here. I'm going to need to start with a larger mass of dough. One thing I should note about chocolate dough, here's some dough that I worked for a period of time. It's been in my hands. It's super smooth. This is dough that had been bundled. I had made it and I packaged it and I haven't worked it yet. So it's a little darker and shinier on the outside. This came from the same batch. And I don't know if you can notice, but it's actually a little crusty on the outside. So oftentimes before I work with dough and I want to add more dough to this mass so I can get a bigger ribbon. I can either need it on my work surface. But if it's all gritty, sometimes there are a little gritty of cocoa butter crystals that are recrystallized when you made the dough. Sometimes you can feel them in the dough. And the way to get rid of them most often is to just run this dough through the finest setting on the pasta machine and it'll kind of smush out any of those little hard crystals. I don't really feel any in this dough but I'm going to do it anyway just to show you what I mean. So I took it up. I had it opened. I rolled it through on one and now I'm going to roll it through on nine which is the tightest setting. And this is going to actually shred the dough. You'll see it's coming out really sheer and almost shredded. But that also serves to kind of get out any any lumpiness that you might have in the dough. And this is typically more of a problem with white chocolate dough because it has a higher cocoa butter content and some of those cocoa butter crystals can have a tendency to reform and create a little grittiness in that dough more so than than semi-sweet dough. But having done that is now nicely kneaded through. There's none of this harder stuff on the outside so I can get a much more uniform roll when I when I run that through the machine to create these big big bows. So I'm kneading those two pieces together again starting with something that's relatively oblong. And for this ribbon I am going to lightly dust my work surface ever so lightly because after rolling it and cutting it into a ribbon I'm going to emboss it with another rolling pin and that second roll over it can cause it to stick to the surface sometimes and I want to be able to get it off after I've done all that. So the first step again is similar to what we've done before just taken it through the machine. Trying to move my hand here together side to keep it anchored I wish I could have clamped this to my surface you should definitely do that. This does a little soft so it folded back on itself before I pulled it out so I lost a piece back here. That's the reason for guiding it through as you go. For these embossed ribbons I won't roll it to setting three. The most I have a roll it two is two which is the second-wideest setting because as I roll it with this embossing pin and the second step I'm going to flatten the ribbon even more and I find that if I roll it too thin to start it's hard to get any texture in the ribbon with the other pin. So lightly dusted surface roll to a two setting I've got a few little air bubbles in there but I think I'll come out when I run this other pin over it and there are different tools you can use from embossing ribbons this is a tracing wheel for sewing just to create stitch marks. There are also these textured rolling pins and they come in all sorts of different textures. This one happens to be kind of a basket weave pattern and now I'll simply roll it over on the top to create that imprint. There are also things called texture mats which are flat plastic sheets that have texture in them which you stick face down onto the dough and then roll a regular rolling pin over to transfer that impression into the dough but here you're working with the pin. So again while the dough is still pliable you want to just do a nice uniform roll. The difference here is I haven't cut my ribbon first because I've already cut my ribbon first and then roll this rolling pin over it and end up with all sorts of wavy edges. So I emboss the whole sheet and I'll cut maybe multiple ribbons out of this. I can probably get two big fat ribbons out of this if I'm if I'm lucky it's not the widest sheet but you want to emboss first before cutting the ribbons or you'll misshape your ribbons and that's an important difference. I'm going to cut these about three quarters of an inch wide to make that ribbon. As I said I think I can get two out. I'm leaving all the other pieces down same thing I did before. If there's anything on the tip and this is more likely to be the case with chocolate dough because it's softer and it tends to mess up your cutting tools clean it off the blade between cuts. Now hopefully that light dusting is enough to make it easy to get these pieces off the cutting board without miss shaping the ribbon. If not ball up the dough dust the surface a little bit more maybe let the chocolate dough sit a little bit after you've worked it because it can soften up in that process and become harder to handle but I had no trouble really getting these off without stretching the ribbons. So there are my embossed ribbons to create this half loop. I do just what I did for that little chocolate cookie ribbon. I just form a loop bend it back on itself. The dough is heavier because it's bigger so these loops will tend to collapse on themselves a little more readily than the small ones as well. So you may not be able to do as many at once before they start pressing into each other but what you can do is do three or four if you want to create a full bow let that sit a little bit let it air dry then do another loop or two and then add it to the previous piece. There's just maybe a little bit more waiting time when you're working with big large chocolate pieces to prevent them from smushing into each other. So that's the basics of ribbon work with both rolled fondant and chocolate dough we covered how to make handles for basket cookies we covered how to make tea little ribbons for cookies larger ribbons for cakes that are embossed and also showed a scalloped edge cutting technique for making these little ribbon roses. In my other videos you'll see how I apply these to decorating cookies and cakes so stay tuned!