Ankita and I started Global Belly with one goal in mind: to help people cook the foods that inspire them. You would imagine that to be quite obvious but cooking what you love can be a challenging task. Finding the right ingredients, procuring the right tools, wading through various recipes and techniques and finally taking a bet and settling on one. We wanted to make the whole process easier and we believe with our DIY cooking kits we have. Our customers have been enjoying cooking their favorite international recipes with confidence, but we know that is not the only foods that inspire you. While we all can appreciate the "ugly delicious" some of you may also be inspired by the beautiful and sweet.
Ankita and I discovered SweetAmbs while scrolling through our Instagram feed one distracted afternoon. Amber Spiegel is a professional cookie decorator who brings art, baking, and tutorials all together. I devoured her feed, spending hours watching her pipe, swirl, and paint royal icing with ease. Her cookies are truly a work of art and her tutorials even make it seem approachable, so much so that I attempted to try to do it myself. I drove to a specialty-baking store, bought cookies cutters of various shapes, gel colors, luster dusts, piping tips, pastry bags, couplers, a scriber, royal icing ingredients, and bag ties since I read that rubber bands just don’t cut it. The whole thing set me back about $100. When I came home and got started, I broke out my weighing scale from culinary school, because I remember how important is to weight your ingredients when you bake, scoured my pantry for some flour, sugar, cardamom and orange zest and finally got started. I realized this was the hardest part. Everything else felt easy, but the task of getting it all together with precision, well that’s enough of a hill to de-motivate anyone. If any of her 3 million followers wanted to re-create one of her inspiring cookies did they really have to go through all that? “We could totally make this easier”, I thought, so we did.
Over that last few weeks we had the pleasure of working with Amber and deconstructing her tutorials down to all the elements that an average Joe or Jane may need. Together we chose two designs that we felt her fans would be excited to re-create. Amber is known for her beautiful brush embroidery designs that elevate her cookies to something you may want to put up on a wall. The intricate looking technique is easy once you have the right tools and supplies. We have even included her template to make it super simple. These cookies are meant to impress and are perfect for summer brunches, baby/bridal showers, tea parties or any elegant affairs you want to add a personal touch to.
The second kit is one of amber’s more whimsical creations, Coffee and Donut cookies. What we loved about this design is the fact that you have room to play. There are so many different ways to decorate those donuts and it’s seemed like it would make a fun project for friends or family.
All of Amber’s kits include her SweetAmbs Cookie mix, which is her signature blend of flour, baking powder, cardamom powder, and orange zest. The mix lends to a sweet, bright and slightly floral cookie, and is proportioned for making a batch of 24. The kits also include pre-portioned agave syrup, pure vanilla extract, sugar, sprinkles, edible luster dust, gel colors, scriber, piping bags, piping tips, coupler, bag ties, all cookie cutters, templates and of course a detailed step by step recipe card. Order her kits on pre-sale today! Each kit is $44.99 and ships nationwide starting June 6th.
And that begins our new chapter folks, we are spreading our Global Belly goal to the baking world and you can trust that we wont stop there. Look out for more amazing products from your favorite bloggers and chefs we have coming out in the following months.