Happy (almost) New Year!

I hope everyone celebrates the New Year safely tonight and rings in 2013 in style. I have been feeling under the weather and my poor husband has to work tomorrow, so we will not be out amongst the party people.

Christmas Poinsettia

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas  and Santa brought you something that made you smile. I have had a very busy Christmas season and while I intended to post more cookies, it just didn't happen. I should have asked Santa for a clone of myself that could take care of all the things I never seem to have time for.

This year I made time to bake and decorate an entire batch of gingerbread cookies for my grandma's Christmas gathering. I shamelessly stole this idea from here and I love how it turned out.

All I want for Christmas...

When people think of Christmas cookies, I bet they don't think of these!!

Gingerbread Time!

Once, many years ago I decided to make my own gingerbread house, completely from scratch - using a metric cookbook. It didn't go well. I don't remember ever attempting gingerbread since then...until this year. I figured since I have done fairly well with other roll out cookies I might as well attempt gingerbread again.

The forgotten cookie

Every year around Christmas time, my aunt makes these mythical cookies that she calls Horse Collar Cookies. I call them mythical because my google-fu is defeated any time I have tried to look these cookies up. Every search term I try yields random, unrelated content that is most definitely not descriptive of the cookies and is often not in English. 

Cookies with Kids

Long time no blog, Hopefully I will have a better month in December. I did a few projects in November but didn't take pictures of them.

I did take pictures this weekend though, so I'm finally updating!

Walking on Sunshine

Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast almost 2 weeks ago and just over a week later they were hit with a Noreaster that brought snow to an already devastated area. Every one of the people I've talked to from the area was affected either at work or at home. Last week one of my contacts said they hoped the weekend brought them some sunshine. I made these to send out to them in hopes that they'll bring a smile to someone's face.

Ribbon Cookies

Ribbon cookies for Crohn's Awareness as well as Breast Cancer Awareness.

Cookies for a Cause

The cause in question today is Crohn's & Colitis. This summer my brother signed up to do the Vegas Rock 'n' Roll 1/2 Marathon through Team Challenge. The marathon and half marathon will be in December and Team Challenge provides training and a sense of really making a difference. Participants must commit to raising a certain amount of money before race time. The mentors associated with Team Challenge and CCFA (Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America) help the team do several fundraisers before race time. A recent event was a bowling night with a silent auction - we brainstormed some ideas to put together a basket for the auction and I made extras of some of the cookies for him to sell to add funds to his goal.

Without further ado...

 He requested I cookie the "Welcome to Vegas" sign we saw online. I was very worried about this cookie, but I think it's my favorite out of the bunch. Funny how that works out.

 A CCFA cookie on a fancy square. The CCFA logo is actually a much darker blue, but I am lazy like that - I don't always worry so much about matching colors.

 A lucky roll of "7" on the dice and Black Jack cards to represent Vegas.

 We made extra Team Challenge cookies because we thought the participants might get a kick out of these. I love this banner cutter!

 An amy of stick-figure Team Challenge runners. Little brother asked me to do something to feature the bright orange racing singlet that the runners wear. I went with stick figures to highlight my drawing skills...actually I didn't want to mix up flesh tones and hair colors. Somehow no matter how many times I read Harry Potter, house elves don't magically become real and I can't enchant the dishes to wash themselves.

Here are all the cookies together but sadly I did not take a picture of the final arrangement. We shrink-wrapped the whole thing and raised some money for a good cause.

Happy October!

Somehow October is almost over. It has been a busy month for me and while I planned on doing lots of Halloween cookies and treats, somehow the only cookies I made were eaten and never photographed. Oops.

I do have these to share though:

A few pumpkins I threw together.

Some breast cancer ribbons, complete with dough tinted pink.

I hope your October was amazing and you're as excited as I am for fall holidays. I'm going to be posting some fun cookies I did for my brother soon and am hoping to make some Wonder Woman cookies for my grandma's birthday in November. She is a Wonder Woman as she had some health issues earlier this year and has bounced back so well you would never know she had any troubles at all.

Family Reunion

I did a few cookies for a family reunion in Georgia that I wasn't able to actually attend. I sent them with my parents who drive all over the country to visit friends and family. My mom isn't even retired yet, I can't imagine  how much travelling they'll do when she doesn't have to report in to work anymore.

Here are the cookies:

The letter H for "Hoover" was my first attempt at using my new Kopykake. I am not brave enough to do the piping directly on the cookie yet, but traced it with a foodcolor marker and then did my piping.

Some Georgia peaches, although the color turned out far more orange than I wanted.

Let's pretend it's a nice fuzzy peach color, shall we?

And some love from Minnesota.

All together now!

Hopefully I can actually attend the reunion next year!

Muffin Tops!

This summer I went on a mad search for muffin top pans. Not because I wanted to make muffin tops. Oh no, I had an ulterior motive. You see every summer we go on vacation with a large group of people. We split up breakfast and dinner duties so that every couple cooks for the entire group at each of those meals throughout the week of vacation. Our breakfast of choice lately has been breakfast sandwiches. The idea of cracking an egg into the muffin top pan and baking it was very appealing - one less thing to do on the griddle. These pans work wonderfully for baking eggs for breakfast sandwiches but they also produce a delicious muffin top.

I bought the Fat Daddio pan off Amazon which is not coated with non-stick coating. If I had to do it again I may have gone with one of the other options. The first time I used it, I used spray liberally and still had a beast of a time cleaning it afterwards. It seems it is getting better over time, but man that first time of washing it sure had me second guessing myself.

Here's the  pan all ready to go with the batter (straight out of the box!) and the scoop I used to measure it into the cavities. I've read you should use the same amount you'd use for a regular muffin but you end up with some flat, pancake-looking muffin tops and I'm not a fan of that so I used extra and yielded only 9 muffin tops for one box of mix.

Make sure to spray not only the cavities but the entire pan liberally as I had a lot of overflow (maybe if you followed directions that wouldn't happen?).  Also - if you take a close look at the pan - it looks like it has been through war. I threw these in a tote to bring them on our vacation and look how terrible they look! I don't even know what caused this!

I am a bad blogger because I don't have the obligatory torn apart piece to show you the delicious crumb on these things. By the time they came off the pan, I wasn't thinking about taking pictures!

Bachelorette Party Cookies

I made these cookies on a whim for my soon-to-be-sister-in-law's bachelorette party. As I wasn't one of the hostesses I didn't know if I should, but the invitation was just so cute, I couldn't resist.

 Isn't that the cutest invitation? And no... questionable body parts in evidence.

This is the finished set, detailed pictures below if you're interested.

Fall leaves

These are cookies I did for a couple's wedding shower last month. They are getting married in just over a week - it's about time I posted the cookies!

First off, I have no idea how people can bake or make cookies with only one or two cookie sheets. I won't admit how many are in my cupboard but this picture does not show them all!

I think I need to invest in a bun rack...

I decorated these with fall colors - browns, yellows, green, orange, red...

 

 and then added some veining with luster dust mixed with vodka.

I really liked how the acorns turned out. One thing I would have changed was to use darker sanding sugar, but nobody noticed except for me (or they were too polite to say so!).

We bought Sam's Club cupcakes and added these small cookies as toppers.

Cake stand alert!

The extras went into bowls and were set out on the table with a couple of healthier options.

I love how small cookies look and people seem to feel less guilty about eating them. They sure aren't any less work though!

Animal Crackers!

A little while ago (ok like a month ago) an amazing thing happened. My husband volunteered to make cookies with me. But only if we made animal cracker cookies. That day I had a post from Confessions of a Cookbook Queen open and he said he would make those cookies with me. I didn't conveniently have mini animal cookie cutters on hand but knew that Michael's stocked a set that would be perfect. Off we ran to pick up the mini cutter set and sprinkles. There aren't a lot of pictures of this but he did most of the work and everyone loved them.

 

We followed her recipe except for the cardamom since we didn't have any handy (we can run to the store for cookie cutters, not for spices!). Everyone said they tasted pretty authentic so I'm going to go out on a limb and say if you don't have it handy, you probably don't need to drop everything to run to the store.

Cutting out all these little buggers was tedious and very time consuming. We also produced a lot more "crackers" than the recipe said we would. Dave now has a little more appreciation for the hours I spend in the kitchen!

Dipping them in the candy coating was fairly easy and we got a little surprise. I normally don't prefer the Wilton candy melts but they worked far better for this project than the kind I normally get at the cake supply store. We dipped a few at a time and then sprinkled our nonpareils on them when the candy coating was still tacky.

I completely forgot to take a picture of the finished goods but luckily Dave took one that I'm stealing for the blog. Also, we did three colors but the white ones were in the freezer and therefore not represented.

Happy Baking!

Cake Stand Project

I have one of these boring old cake stands and decided to get a little crafty with it. I have this stand from Wilton, the floating tiers cake stand. I'm sure it looks fine if you're actually presenting cakes on it, but I tend to use it for cupcakes/desserts and it looks a little...cheap.

Doughnuts!

I bought a doughnut pan a while back and have only used it a couple times. But doughnuts are pretty too, right? I only bought one pan but recommend getting two as most recipes seem to make 12 doughnuts (or more).  I threw the extra batter in a mini muffin pan rather than waiting for this one to cool enough to do another batch.

 I didn't get fancy and make up my own recipe, I just used the recipe that came with the pan. Except that recipe calls for cake flour and I used whole wheat pastry flour because I had it. These doughnuts definitely had a wheaty taste. I will have to make them again with cake flour or try another recipe altogether. Chocolate maybe?

I don't recommend their recipe for the chocolate sauce. It tastes good but is a mess and never sets up. If you're fond of a chocolate mess, go ahead and make their recipe. I recommend something like Hard Chocolate Glaze, if you make this recipe, halve or quarter it though, this would be way too much as written.  

Cookie Timeline

Last month we helped throw a double 4oth birthday party for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. I volunteered to make cookies and my husband came up with the idea of making a cookie timeline to mark some of the big milestones in their lives. This was a pretty big project for me - I had to split up the cookie dough making, baking, and decorating over a few weekends along with working on it several evenings.

Here are the display cookies, we put "decoration" signs on them so nobody would eat a key character and leave the timeline with a hole.

Dan and Cindy were born in July of 1972. I googled the month so that this calendar would be accurate. I used little candy stars to mark their birthdays.

 Here we have teen Dan and Cindy - Dan is sporting a mullet (if you look closely) and Cindy had some big hair. They met at Pizza Hut (I love how this cookie turned out, the red part is an upside down bikini bottom). Some of their early jobs were Royal Line (which I could not find any sort of logo for, so I made this up) and Holiday. Their first apartment was referred to as Melrose Place because all their friends lived there. Their first pet was Bird who is still around to this day.

 Dan proposed on Christmas morning with a ring in Cindy's stocking. I used large sparkling sugar to represent the diamond. Their first dog was Bailey, A Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Then we have the bride and groom. I actually ran out of white icing so if you look carefully you may notice that the bottom of the dress is whiter than the top. Then came Baby Sara, then Baby Ashley.

 Now we come to the present day, I made business card style cookies using the logos of their current employers. I am especially proud of the WipAire logo! Sara and Ashley growing up.

Their current dog is Lacey, another Chesapeake. We have a stick figure family cookie and then the fancy square Happy Birthday cookie.

 Here is a close-up of the girls - Sara is in dance and always has crazy, embelished costumes, so I used dots, stripes and sanding sugar and gave her an outie belly button. Ashley is quite the diva and has little sugar pearls on her skirt, a scarf and pink hair ties.

 These are the eating cookies. There was actually another plate but I didn't get a picture of that. Funny how I can spend hours on these and then not get pictures of everything.

Here's the very end of the project. I was looking up images on my ipad and copying them onto tracing paper. This mess is actually very minor, I must have cleaned up most of it by then. You can see my artist palette, I mixed food coloring with water and painted some cookies (the ones I mentioned not having pictures for).

All the food colorings I used for this project. Yes there are 20 bottles there.

Gone Golfin'

These are some golf cookies I did for a friend back in June, I just never got around to water-marking them and posting them. And it has been a hot summer friends - the kind of summer where turning on the oven and heating the house up just doesn't appeal so I haven't done many projects in the last couple months. On to the golf!

These were done as prizes for a golf outing, here are the finished sets and then I'll post the individual pieces.

Most of these are handcut - which I could clearly use more practice!

Golf cart - hand cut. I actually liked how this one turned out.

Golf tee - handcut.

Golf ball - I let the icing crust over and then used the end of a paint brush to make the dimples. I sprayed Wilton's pearl spray on all the golf balls to give the nice shiny effect.

Mini golf balls - I packaged these in a pretzel bag with a grass background.

Golf clubs! The small one is from a cookie cutter, the big one is handcut.

You can see the ragged edges on this one.

 Golf bag - I like how the bags turned out (handcut) but you can really see the ragged edges here. I should have taken more time cleaning that up before I baked or used a fine grater after baking. This is an enormous cookie, it was something like 6" by 3" or thereabouts.

A little golf polo shirt - I used a Wilton t-shirt cutter. I would have liked to not have the "V" in the neckline, next time I'll just cut a triangle to fill that in and piece the shapes together.

A little golf scene to round things out. I did two textures for the clouds. The flat ones were dropped in while the blue icing was still wet, when that crusted over I added the other little cloud blobs. I used gold sanding sugar over gold icing for the sand trap.

I got the golf cookie boxes at www.karenscookies.net and used a block of floral foam in the bottom and covered it with tissue paper. Then I bagged these, taped wooden skewers onto them and arranged them. A gift basket bag from Michael's kept everything together.

Hope you enjoyed.