Elephant and Giraffe Birthday Cookies

These elephants and giraffes were made for Andrew's cousin's birthday (ages ago!).

He loves the zoo!

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!

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!

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.