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.