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.