Christmas Eve cookie decorating

On Christmas Eve I pulled out all my cookie decorating supplies for Andrew and me to decorate cookies! We put on the Grinch and got to work.

He usually watched while I decorate things with specific colors in specific ways, so this time I let him choose the shapes, colors, and how he wanted to decorate. Hence the pterodactyl in the above picture.

We used gingerbread cookies and buttercream icing.

His gingerbread man has a funny mouth.

Note the Christmas cow.

We happily ate our mistakes!

A stocking for Me, the baby, and Andrew!

Yes, there is a dinosaur, some squirels, and a sheep.

There's the traditional Christmas octopus...

We had lots of fun decorating and eating cookies!

Gingerbread House

Seminary housing had a gingerbread contest this Christmas, so Andrew and I rose to the challenge!

We found a template for a gingerbread house, sized it, printed it, and used it to cut out the gingerbread pieces.

Then we baked the gingerbread, crushed butterscotch candies, filled the windows, and put the pieces back in the oven to melt. Before assembling, I piped on the details and Andrew sanded down the edges to fit perfectly with the micro-plane grater.

Andrew made a box base and covered it with foil. He put holes in it so we could fill it with Christmas lights. They lit up the melted candy in the windows to make the house glow. We then put together the house around the bunched up Christmas lights.

Here's the finished product (pardon the not-so-great lighting).

The trees are upside down ice cream cones with dark green icing piped with a star tip. After they dried, I used meringue powder and water (egg whites would have worked, too) to glue on some sanding sugar snow to the branches.

We also added candy canes to the corners of the house.

The snow on the ground is royal icing covered with sanding sugar.

The ceiling is wheat Chex cereal. This took forever! We had to get the Chex pieces to be just the right shape and size to fit in odd roof angles. We dusted the finished roof with powdered sugar snow.

The walkway is made of cappuccino jelly beans.

The berries on the greenery are red sprinkles that I added with tweezers.

We won the housing competition and probably started a new Christmas tradition! This was a lot of fun!

Late Mother's Day flowers.

I made these pink and white flower cookies to send to my mom for mother's day. Unfortunately, I they didn't actually get made until Mother's Day, and my mom lives 12 hours away from here, so they arrived a good while after Mother's Day...

Now I'm talking about them almost a month after Mother's Day, so I guess I should just call them Spontaneous Summer Flowers for My Mom.

I kept it simple with only 2 icing colors for the designs. Sometimes simple is better, especially with flowers and bright colors.

The tulips are my favorite.

Or maybe the daisies...

I like them all! They are chocolate cookies after all, and chocolate is great no matter what shape.

Happy Easter!

I hope everyone is having a lovely Easter! Andrew and I had a wonderful time at church this morning celebrating Christ rising from the dead and conquering death! Yesterday, I made a bunch of flower cookies to give to my Kindergarten Sunday school class. I picked bright spring colors and a simple design so that I could make a bunch of cookies pretty quickly.

The most time consuming part of cookie decorating (besides cleaning up) is preparing the icing. Mixing it to the right consistency, separating it out, dying it the right colors, and putting it in piping bags takes a long time. Especially for this many colors.

I made a few bunnies after I have a little over 30 flowers (I was pretty sure we wouldn't have 30 kids). My grandmother's birthday fell on Easter this year, so I thought I'd send her some spring cookies. She's getting bunnies and a few flowers mailed to her (it will be a little late for a birthday present. I'm not very punctual about these things).

I picked the colors carefully. Kindergarten boys can sometimes be very sensitive about "girl colors," and because flowers are already a bit girly, I wanted to make sure I could give out blue to the boys. I figured yellow wouldn't cause any problems either.

I guess I could have made them all yellow and blue, but I like pink and purple, and I'm the one making the cookies so I if I want pink and purple cookies I make pink and purple cookies.

I packaged them in individual bags with a Happy Easter tag that listed the ingredients on the back. I handed them out to parents as they picked up the kids so that the parents could decide when and if the kids ate their cookie (I didn't want to have to worry about allergy problems, that's why I listed the ingredients).

After the bunnies dried I added sanding sugar to their tails. To add sanding sugar or sprinkles after a cookie is dry, just mix a solution of meringue powder and water and paint it onto the area you want the sugar to stick with a clean paintbrush (egg whites can be substituted for the meringue powder solution, but make sure they are pasteurized). Spoon the sugar onto the area, then gently shake off the extra sugar.

I made the eggs with some leftover dough just for fun. I love designs where I get to swirl colors together.

I hope everyone had a very happy Easter!

Valentine's Day Cupcakes

Homemade Hostess Cupcakes

What food says "I love you bunches!" better than chocolate? When I decided to bake something for my sweetie for Valentine's Day, I knew it had to be chocolate - and it had to be cake. Andrew loves most everything I bake, but if I bake something just for him, I bake cake.

I don't exactly dislike cake, but it's not my favorite way to consume sugar. If I'm going to eat something unhealthy and sweet, it'd be rather have cookies, pie, ice cream, or plain old, delicious chocolate.

But my apathy towards cake should not deprive my wonderful husband of one of his favorite desserts. So I decided to bake cupcakes for Valentine's Day. Chocolate cupcakes filled with vanilla cream and dipped in chocolate ganache.

If it weren't for the insane amount of dirty dishes I was left with at the end of this 4 part recipe, I'd say making these homemade hostess cupcakes was pretty easy. If you have a dishwasher at your house (or a someone willing to help with the dishes in exchange for food) this is a fun, tasty recipe.

To make them more fitting for Valentine's Day, I wrote love in cursive on some of them instead of the loop design normally found on Hostess cupcakes.

Andrew loved them - especially the filling - so I might be making a version of this for his birthday.

The recipe is at bakeat350.blogspot.com. I dipped the cupcakes in the chocolate instead of trying to spread it on with a knife, and the chocolate turned out really smooth with just the right thickness. I might use a different cake recipe next time; the cake was a bit dry (but the filling hides that). My oven runs hot, so the dryness could have come from that. We think they are tastier than the Hostess version, and I love that they can be personalized.

What did you make/buy/do for your sweetie for Valentine's Day?