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.

Georgia Tech Graduation cookies

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last updated my blog! These last few weeks have flown by. Andrew and I took a trip to Ashville to see the Biltmore House and my wonderful parents, Andrew's parents came all the way from Iowa to visit us, and Andrew's spent most of his free time studying for finals.

Luckily for the future of my blog, I've also been baking cookies! These Yellow Jacket cookies were made for my brilliant cousin, Joey, who just graduated from Georgia Tech.

I didn't have a GT mascot cookie cutter sitting around, so I just used a circular cookie and drew on the design. They aren't perfectly uniform, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out considering I don't have a way to project the image onto the cookie.

I packaged all the cookies up individually for the trip, and I'm told they all made in to my Aunt whole!

Congratulations Joey! I hope you liked the cookies!

Robot Cookies

I made robot cookies for a friend's baby shower Sunday.

There were robots on the cupcake kit they used for the party, so I based my cookies off of those robots.

I did the bodies and the color details the first day, waiting a few hours for the icing to set before adding the top details.

I added the black icing details the next day to prevent color bleeding. I think I got the black icing a little too thick, it would not flow smoothly from the icing tip.

I used made four different colors of robots, each color with a different design.

The blue ones are my favorite. I liked the light on the top of their heads.

Blue and White Butterflies

I tried a couple new designs for butterfly cookies the other day.

To make this butterfly, I drew a white line down the center of each wing while the icing was still wet.

Then I dragged a toothpick back and forth through the icing.

These butterflies are simpler than my usual design, but I like the simplicity.

I also used the brush embroidery technique on a couple of butterflies.

After experimenting awhile, I decided to ice the rest of the butterflies with zigzags on the top wings and dots on the bottom, like I usually ice them.

I used teal, blue, and white and rotated the colors on each butterfly.

Butterflies might be my favorite cookie to ice. There are so many color and design options that they are hard to mess up and almost always end up looking pretty good!

Brush Embroidery

I finally found a design that I like for the teacup and teapot cookies! I made the flowers with a technique I just learned called brush embroidery.

After looking up how to do brush embroidery, I practiced on a salad plate.

I used thick royal icing and outlined a flower.

Then I dragged a clean paint brush from the edge of the outline towards the center.

After the outside petals are finished, I do the same thing with the inside petals and finish with a dot in the center of the flower.

I think I'm going to be playing around with this style of decorating a lot now. I really like how it turned out!

Fixing Mistakes

I had some extra icing and dough from the birthday ladybug cookies that I didn't want to go to waste, so, along with a batch of black, red, and white butterflies, I took the opportunity to try out a little apple cookie cutter I'd not used yet.

One thing I learned pretty quickly when I picked up this new hobby is that mistakes are inevitable with a medium as fragile as sugar. Often these mistakes just get eaten by Andrew, one of our friends, or myself, but sometimes a messed up cookie can be salvaged.

A common problem I have is when flood icing leaks off the edge of a cookie. This happened with one of the apples.

To fix the mistake, I first waited until the icing had hardened for a few hours. Then, I pulled the cookie off of the baking sheet.

I gently rubbed off the icing to the edge of the cookie with my clean fingers.

Because I had added the white stripe to the cookie before it leaked, I had to cover up part of the stripe with red icing. I piped on just a tiny bit and worked it into the right place with a clean paint brush.

After allowing the new icing to dry for a few minutes, I piped on a new white stripe.

It's still obvious that one cookie is messed up, but not as obvious as before. After it dried completely, it looked even better.

I never actually finished the apple cookies; I just didn't want to make a tiny bit of green icing for only three sets of stems and leaves. Maybe in the fall I'll make a whole batch of red, green, and yellow apples!

Ladybug Birthday Cookies

These lady bug cookies were for a little girl's first birthday party. Her mom gave me a picture to work from and asked that I add a 1 to the cookie.

Black and red are the hardest colors to use. Red is difficult because it takes more dye to get it the right shade than other colors do. Black icing needs a lot of dye too, and it can bleed onto other colors. For this reason, I did each stage of the cookie in shifts and allowed the icing to dry for 24 hours before I added the details on top.

I added the head and feet after the red body had dried for a day.

I let the head set up for a few minutes, then added the other details.

The white details on the face were added after the black dried overnight. (I thought the ladybugs looked a bit creepy at this point.)

I added the pupils and the 1 after another few hours of drying.

The most difficult thing about these cookies was trying to make them uniform. If I had a ladybug cookie cutter, it would have been easy to make sure every ladybug was the same size and shape, but free-handing the shape on a round cookie was a challenge.

I think the faces turned out pretty cute, and I'm so relieved that the colors did not bleed. All that patience and planning was worth it.

After the cookies were completely dry, I packaged them in individual bags and tied the tops with a coordinating ribbon.

I hope the birthday girl liked her cookies!