Excuses & Elephants

It's been awhile since I've updated, but I have an excuse! I've been really, really busy - much busier than normal. I just started a new job last Friday, and the process of getting and beginning the job required several trips across the county, interviews, paperwork, orientation, and a TB test! Finally the paperwork is done and the job has begun.

I should be able to get back to cookie decorating this weekend. Easter is coming up, and I plan to have Easter cookies to hand out to my Sunday school class. Until then, I leave you with a few cookies I worked on before my hiatus.

Butterflies

It was a gray, cloudy morning this morning, so after church I decided to decorate something bright and cheery.

Butterflies are fun to decorate because they can be iced in a wide assortment of colors and patterns. I went with pink, blue, yellow, and black

I outlined the cookies with black, then let them sit and dry for several hours. The black shows up much better on sugar cookies than chocolate cookies, but I was in a chocolate cookie mood.

I started with the top wings and let them sit for a little while before I did the bottom wings to try to prevent the sections from blending together. I wasn't patient enough, though, so they blended a bit. I think they still turned out fine.

To add the details on top, I added lines and dots of different colors while the icing was still wet. The details will smooth out and the icing will dry flat. The zigzag pattern on the top wing is made by dragging a toothpick through lines while everything is still wet.

I'm happy with the way the butterflies turned out, and making bright, colorful cookies was just what I needed for a gray, rainy day!

Early Cookie Decorating Attempts

I'm not feeling well today; my stupid sinuses causing me problems, so no new baking or decorating projects to showcase. Instead, here are some of my first attempts at cookie decorating from when I started in June.

These are the second batch of cookies I decorated. They don't look awful, but the piping is pretty bad (I can't say my piping is wonderful now, though. That's something that takes lots of practice).

What I remember most about these cookies is the intense almond flavor of the icing. I didn't have any clear vanilla at the time, so I used almond to flavor my icing and my hand slipped, spilling about a quarter of a bottle of almond extract into the icing.

This was the only successful product of my very first cookie decorating experiment. The others look pretty unappatizing. Trying to figure out the proper icing consistancy as well as a failed attempt at mixing food coloring to get purple resulted in this mess:

They looked gross, but they tasted fine.

I learned a lot from my mistakes in both these early batches. I think my third cookie decorating project was much more successful. It produced these cookies

I'm really loving this new hobby. I'm so glad a ran across a few really helpful blogs that gave me the confidence to try this myself!

Comic cookies

Comics are fun to make into cookies. They usually have simple shapes and just a few solid colors, which makes them easy to outline and flood.

Plus, they're fun!

I used black icing and a small icing tip (#1) to outline the characters. Then, I filled in the spaces with the appropriate color. I waited about 30 minutes for the outline to dry and at least 10-15 minutes for each flooded section to set before I filled in the adjacent section. If you don't wait long enough, two adjacent flooded sections can sometimes blend together over the black line, and I wanted to make sure the black lines showed just like the do in the comics.

I let the flooded icing dry about an hour before I put on the facial features.

The longer you wait for icing to dry the less likely you'll end up with bleeding. This waiting is especially important with black icing. I didn't wait long enough for these to dry. Next time I'll let the cookies sit overnight instead of just 30 minutes. You'll notice that Charlie Brown looks normal here:

But in this picture, taken the next morning, he looks like he has a beard:

That was definitely not intended.

Luckily, Snoopy did not suffer the same fate.

The Dilbert cookies have a little color bleeding, but it didn't ruin them.

I learned a few important lessons from this experiment.

1. Let black icing dry overnight to prevent bleeding.

2. Get a square cookie cutter. Using a pizza cutter and eyeballing it doesn't have the most even results.

3. Skin color icing needs white* added to it first to make it more opaque. The skin looked a bit greenish because the blue background showed through.

But over all, I'm happy with the comic cookies. Especially Snoopy. He makes me smile.

* Yes, they have white icing color, and I've learned that it's really important to use it. It makes the white brighter and more opaque so the background color won't show through. It's also handy if you want to lighten a color.

Birds, polka dots, and more gnomes

I've never seen a red and white polka doted bird. For some reason, I still felt the need to put a couple on a cookie the other day. I love putting polka dots on cookies, so why not add a few spotted birds?

I like how the white and red contrasts with the blue on the gnome cookies, so I put them together. Birds and mushrooms kind of go with gnomes, right?

I'd like to get a mushroom cookie cutter if I make more mushroom cookies. A gnome cookie cutter would be nice too. (If i don't watch out I'll be overrun with cookie cutters. I don't have enough space for the ones I have now...)

Comic strip cookies are coming tomorrow!

Gnomes

I'm not completely sure what compelled me to make gnome cookies. Maybe it's the whimsical drawing I found online with curling branches and cute little mushrooms. Or it could be the fact that gnomes are cute, but usually simple shapes with just a few colors. More likely it's the random assortment of gnomes in our house that I see on a regular basis.

I don't think my husband ever meant to start collecting gnomes - in fact, I doubt he'd admit he has a gnome collections now (but trust me, he does). A few years back his mom was asking him what he wanted for his birthday or Christmas or something. He was being difficult and gave her very few legitimate ideas. In his list, he jokingly included a lawn gnome and so he got one, then another, and another, and another. We even had a couple at our wedding on the groom's table.

With gnomes all over my house, I had a lot of inspiration for these gnome cookies.

I started with chocolate cookies iced in solid colors and left to dry overnight.

I used back icing and the smallest tip I have - a #1 tip- to outline the design.

I let them dry for about an hour. I learned later that I should have let them dry overnight, but I'll talk more about that in a future post.

I filled in each section carefully, letting it set for a few minutes before filling the adjacent section.

The tooth pick helps push the flood icing into small spaces.

These pictures were taken at night, so the color is a bit off.

I added the top details like the eyes and the lines on the trees after the flood icing dried overnight.

The whimsical curly trees and tiny spotted mushrooms are my favorite.

I tried several designs to see what worked best, but next time I'll probably pick just one design and focus on making them uniform. These take a long time because of the details and the waiting between steps, but I'm happy with how they turned out.

Painting on Cookies

This was a total experiment. I've seen people paint on cakes, and I realized my gel icing colors are a similar consistency to paint, so I thought I'd give painting cookies a try. I'm definitely not the first person to do this; I've done some searched online and found many gorgeous pictures of hand painted cookies that are much more impressive than this one, but it's my first attempt.

My canvas is a chocolate cookie with smooth white flood icing that I let dry overnight.

My palate is a clean white bowl with gel paste icing colors. I use wilton brand that you can find at the craft section pretty much anywhere. The tooth picks are what I use to get the icing out of their containers; just a tiny bit of icing color goes a really long way. I used pink, red, purple, and white for the flower.

I also had a tea cup of water and an assortment of clean paint brushes that I only use for cookie decorating. I've realized I need some smaller brushes if I want to paint precisely and with more details.

I had fun painting these flowers, and I'm excited about the possibilities this opens up!

Flowers for a Friend

I made more flower cookies for a co-worker yesterday. I meant to start them Wednesday night, but Andrew and I were exhausted, so I didn't start until Thursday morning.

She wanted 10 cookies, but let me choose the style and color. I picked blue, light blue, and white flowers.

I had a few extra, so I've been playing with taking pictures of them on different surfaces.

I also made a bunch of letter cookies, too.

I spelled stuff. Like my blog name.