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.