Something Sweet: Forest Themed Baby Shower Cookies

I always love making a set of cookies where I have free creative reign. This set was an absolute joy to make. I was given a theme and a price range to work within and this is what I came up with.
These cookies were for a baby shower and the theme was forest...from there I got to run with it.
I got to try a few new techniques on these cookies and am excited to try them again.

The first new technique I tried was an antique china crackle technique. You can find a brilliant tutorial from the brilliant sweetambs. I changed up the technique a bit because I didn't have fine enough petal dust to go into the etches I made. On the first cookie pictured I made the etches extra deep and panted on the petal dust with a wet brush and then rubbed off the excess with a damp paper towel. On the second cookie pictured I did lighter etches (which the petal dust didn't stick in very well) glazed it with corn syrup, let the corn syrup dry over night and then etched that again and added more petal dust. This application seemed to work the best, the petal dust stuck in the etches made in the corn syrup. If I do this method again I think I will only etch the corn syrup and skip etching the icing.

The next technique I tried was making "moss" covered cookies. I followed the wonderfully simple tutorial by Mike at Semi Sweet I opted to add the crushed up graham crackers to wet icing instead of letting it crust over (Like mike suggests) because I was concerned with the crumbs flaking off. It worked perfectly. I added some dimension to the cookies by adding a second layer of icing to the rabbit ears and tail and the squirrel's tail. The finishing touch was to add cute little bow-ties to these topiary critters.

Finally I did a reverse silhouette cookie, nothing fancy just a cut out of two adorable deer, sprayed over with a gold. I am thrilled with how easy these were and how elegant the cookies turned out. It is a technique that I will be revisiting some time soon.

The following are a few closeups of each of the individual cookies. What are your thoughts on this set? Are there any new techniques out there that you want to try?