Baby Girl Shower Cookies

I made these for a woman at work who was pregnant the same time I was - our due dates were only days apart.I referred to her as the "other pregnant lady" for months. I enjoyed doing these and may have pretended they were for my own baby (I think our babies were born 6 days apart). 

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Cookies

It's October, which means fall is in the air and women's (and men's) breasts are okay to discuss freely. Get those babies checked out!

I Brought the Awesome

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law both turned 30 this summer and decided to throw a big party to celebrate. 

Chocolate Chip Roll Out Cookies

I've been meaning to try a new recipe with decorated cookies for  a while and finally got around to trying this recipe recently.

It is really good, so good that only a few cookies survived to get any sort of decoration at all.

He Is Risen

I threw together a few Easter cookies for my grandma this year. Yes - my grandma is the recipient of many of my projects. 

Grandma shared these with the ladies in a nursing home and brought smiles to everyone. One particular woman who suffers from Alzheimer's enjoyed them so much she asked for a second and even smiled - a rare occurrence that brought smiles to everyone. 

 I also left these stenciled chocolate chip Easter Egg cookies for Grandma to enjoy or share or enjoy sharing.

The Basics: Cookie & Icing

Now that you baked some cookies and you made your icing, let's decorate a cookie.

The Basics - Icing

Now that we've made some cookies, let's go over the icing you can use to cover them. As in all aspects of life, there is more than one way to do this - you can use many mediums to ice your cookies. The ones I'm familiar with are Glaze and Royal Icing or a bastardization of the two that I am growing to like more and more. The most important thing when using any of these recipes is getting the correct consistency for your needs. If your icing is too thin, it will spread all over and be a big mess; if it's too thick it will give you arthritis, break a tooth and generally not work out very well. I'm going to put some links in this post that are very helpful if you're interested in learning more. 

Have a Heart...

A couple weeks ago, my mom told me about a fundraiser her VFW was doing for a local woman and asked me to donate some decorated cookies to their bake sale. Having the tender heart I do and feeling genuine heartache at the situation the woman was in, I said no. No I would not donate decorated cookies to the bake sale. I would however sell decorated cookies and donate that money to the woman (via the VFW) instead. You see, making these cookies is a lot of work - these are not fifty cent cookies. I was afraid I would spend so many hours on these and they would raise a fraction of the worth of the cookies at their sale. Oh no, I was not going to let that happen.

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.

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!

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!

May the 4th be with you

I am not a huge Star Wars nerd - my husband however is and I've done a couple Star Wars projects so I thought I'd share.

First of all - Target had Darth Vader heads in the Easter section this year so I bought a couple to surprise my husband. He found an image of Darth to put as his wallpaper and came up with this:

Then there's the Williams Sonoma set of Star Wars vehicles along with some cookies inspired by Star Wars the Old Republic game play. Yes I have spent many hours playing this game. I also spent many hours decorating these cookies - coincidence? I think not. If I remember correctly I was trying out a new icing and had a few technical difficulties. These cookie cutters make beautiful cookies but the stamp is kind of a pain. The cookie looks all great with your design already lined up for you but when you go to ice it things can get a little crazy (frustrating). I've learned a few things since that would probably help me with these. Oh and if you use these cutters you should use very cold dough - some of the shapes don't like to release with a softer dough and because the stamp is built in you can't just loosen it with a knife.

And then there's the Williams Sonoma pancake molds...

And that's all I've got. And yes Darth Vader in the cookie shot does not have a face. I was pretty much done at that point and just slathered the icing on. I don't think I even piped it all nice-like - just a big old mound of frosting smoothed out. I'll have to work on more Star Wars stuff for next year. Maybe something with a face...

Earth Month Cookie - pt 2

I donated this cookie tray to a silent auction at work. It went for $50 - raising money for Aveda's Earth Month campaign. The smaller cookies represent some of the different activities employees and groups organize and take part in throughout the month.

Earth Month Cookie - hand painted

I tried my hand at painting on cookies today - it is not as easy as it looks. You should probably have at least some small skill in painting or drawing if you want to paint on cookies. I don't have that skill so don't judge me too harshly, ok?

To paint on cookies you need a cookie already covered in Royal Icing that has dried for quite a while (12 - 24 hours). If you try to rush and your icing hasn't dried enough the moisture from the paint/water will eat right through the base and you will have an ugly crater. Mix your gel food color with some water/clear extract/vodka in a small bowl or paint pallet. You should use approximately equal amounts of food color and clear liquid (at least that's what I did - someone else may know better).

Aveda Earth Month cookie

The embossing effect looks neat!



This cookie is based off the Aveda Earth Month 2012 poster which is comprised of the drawings of children in India that have benefited from Aveda's association with Global Green Grants. The community now has access to clean water and the children drew these sketches as a "thank you" to the Aveda tribe.

Easter Cookies - a little late

Here are some of the Easter cookies I did this year. Yep, just a little bit late.

Peeps!

A friend asked me to make Easter cookies for her daughter and nieces.

Close ups:

Lamb #1

Lamb #2

Butterfly

Chick 

Bunny 

Tulip 

Daisy 

All together and wrapped up.