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!

So.... I haven't posted in awhile

I haven't updated the blog in forever, but I've been a bit busy. I've been working at a new job (not so new anymore), and I've been growing a baby! Sarah Grace is due to make her way into the world Feb 8th. Between morning sickness, fatigue, and growing too big to comfortably bend down, baking and blogging haven't been priorities.

I have done some baking, though, and so I'm going to start posting again - even though there may be no one left reading.

Birthday Stuff

Andrew's birthday was a couple weeks ago, so we had some friends over to eat cake and play a very confusing board game.

I baked a couple of goodies for Andrew. He'd been requesting chocolate, cherry, oatmeal cookies, so I finally located some dried cherries and made them for him.

I am not a fan of raisins, so dried cherries are my raisin alternative in cookies. We like them a lot around here.

For Andrew's birthday cake, I made a layer cake version of the homemade hostess cupcakes I baked at Valentine's day. I used a different cake recipe that we liked better, but I put the cream filling between the layers and covered the whole thing with chocolate ganache.

It tasted pretty good, but I can say it looked pretty. I'd never covered anything with ganache before, and I think I need a bit of practice.

We played a game called Settlers of Catan with a bunch of friends. We'd heard good things about and and since Andrew got it for his birthday we thought it'd be fun to play. It was, but it was rather confusing to learn at first. Andrew an I were the only ones who had never played before, so we had lots of help learning.

I think the birthday boy had a fun day and enjoyed his birthday treats.

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.

Ethan's Birthday Cookies

I made cookies to send to my brother-in-law for his birthday this year. He's very interested in Russia, so I made the Russian flag in cookie form.

I made cakes with blue stripes and dots because I had extra blue icing after making the flag. I always get worried about making cookies for guys because most of the cookies I usually make are brightly colored and girly or more suited to younger boys (dinosaurs, cars, etc.). Unless the guy is into sports or cars, I have a hard time deciding what to make.

I've been learning, though, that when it comes to food, most men don't really care if it's a pink and girly as long as it tastes good. I do think these cake cookies turned out festive and appropriate for a guy.

I packaged them in individual bags and put them in a box with bubble wrap to mail. Ethan's birthday was last Saturday, but the cookies didn't get mailed until Tuesday... oops...

Ethan got the cookies yesterday, but I forgot to ask him if any of them broke. He didn't mention it, so I'm going to assume they got their in one piece. He did say he liked the Russian flags.

I'm really enjoying making cakes. I can't wait for Andrew's birthday! I already have some ideas.