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!