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!

Spring Cleaning

It's spring! That means lovely weather, short sleeves, beautiful blossoming trees, and an overwhelming desire to get things organized. When it looks this beautiful outside, I can't leave the inside cluttered and unorganized.

Getting an new spring wreath might not be categorized under "organization," but our red berry wreath we got for Christmas just seemed out of place the last few weeks. The new wreath looks like the trees lining the drive to our apartment complex.

My cookie cutters have taken over the house. It's frustrating to find the one I'm looking for and Andrew's about to go nuts because he can't stand it when something doesn't have a proper place to go (it's ok if it's not in its proper place, as long as it has one to go to eventually). We only have so many cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and they were all in use, so we did a bit of rearranging.

We got the cube storage shelf from Target today and moved the table to the center of the kitchen.

I put my cookbooks on the shelf and my cookie cutters in the bins.

I have them separated into three categories: animals; shapes and letters; seasons and special occasions.

We finally got some table clothes for our super cheap, particle board side tables.

And we got a new bed spread. (Ok, we did this a while ago, but I decided to put it here anyway).

We also got baskets to organize our DVDs. It looks less cluttered and they don't all fall every time we get one out.

And we put some shelves and baskets in the bathroom.

We also put shelves in the pantry a short while back, but the pantry is not very organized right now... that's probably our next project.

Now I'm going to go bake some Easter cookies for my Kindergarten Sunday school class! Pictures will be coming on Sunday!

Early Cookie Decorating Attempts

I'm not feeling well today; my stupid sinuses causing me problems, so no new baking or decorating projects to showcase. Instead, here are some of my first attempts at cookie decorating from when I started in June.

These are the second batch of cookies I decorated. They don't look awful, but the piping is pretty bad (I can't say my piping is wonderful now, though. That's something that takes lots of practice).

What I remember most about these cookies is the intense almond flavor of the icing. I didn't have any clear vanilla at the time, so I used almond to flavor my icing and my hand slipped, spilling about a quarter of a bottle of almond extract into the icing.

This was the only successful product of my very first cookie decorating experiment. The others look pretty unappatizing. Trying to figure out the proper icing consistancy as well as a failed attempt at mixing food coloring to get purple resulted in this mess:

They looked gross, but they tasted fine.

I learned a lot from my mistakes in both these early batches. I think my third cookie decorating project was much more successful. It produced these cookies

I'm really loving this new hobby. I'm so glad a ran across a few really helpful blogs that gave me the confidence to try this myself!

Painting on Cookies

This was a total experiment. I've seen people paint on cakes, and I realized my gel icing colors are a similar consistency to paint, so I thought I'd give painting cookies a try. I'm definitely not the first person to do this; I've done some searched online and found many gorgeous pictures of hand painted cookies that are much more impressive than this one, but it's my first attempt.

My canvas is a chocolate cookie with smooth white flood icing that I let dry overnight.

My palate is a clean white bowl with gel paste icing colors. I use wilton brand that you can find at the craft section pretty much anywhere. The tooth picks are what I use to get the icing out of their containers; just a tiny bit of icing color goes a really long way. I used pink, red, purple, and white for the flower.

I also had a tea cup of water and an assortment of clean paint brushes that I only use for cookie decorating. I've realized I need some smaller brushes if I want to paint precisely and with more details.

I had fun painting these flowers, and I'm excited about the possibilities this opens up!

Flowers for a Friend

I made more flower cookies for a co-worker yesterday. I meant to start them Wednesday night, but Andrew and I were exhausted, so I didn't start until Thursday morning.

She wanted 10 cookies, but let me choose the style and color. I picked blue, light blue, and white flowers.

I had a few extra, so I've been playing with taking pictures of them on different surfaces.

I also made a bunch of letter cookies, too.

I spelled stuff. Like my blog name.

Bake Sale Cookies

I haven't had a chance to bake recently, so here are some pictures of cookies from the november bake sale.

I looked at a picture of the globe to pipe the world cookies. Each cookie looked great by itself, but their lack of uniformity was extremely obvious when they were all together. Also, my hand was killing me by the time I finished piping the last one!

I packaged each cookie individually and tied a ribbon at the top.

When the flood icing is too thin, it can leak over the outline like the tulip in the middle. I used meringue powder as a "glue" to get the sprinkled to stick to the outline.

I'll have new stuff to post later this week!

Royal Icing

Royal Icing Tutorial

To get the flat, smooth icing that dries hard enough so you can stack, package, and mail cookies, royal icing is the way to go. To make royal icing, you use powdered sugar plus either meringue powder (they have it in the baking section at craft stores or you can order it online), egg whites and lemon juice (use pasteurized egg whites because they won't be cooked), or corn syrup and milk (not exactly royal icing, but it yields similar results).

I add clear vanilla extract or almond extract as well.

Figuring out the right consistency of the icing is the key to getting smooth, yet easy to control icing. The trick is to run a spoon or knife through the icing and count how long it takes for the surface to smooth out. If it's less than 5 seconds, add more powdered sugar or whip the icing more until it's thicker. If it takes longer than 10 seconds, add water a drop at a time until it's thinner.

For a simple design like the flower, I use only this consistency icing. If the design is more complex, I use a thicker icing to outline the cookie and this thinner icing to fill the inside.

To color the icing, gel past food coloring works best; it won't water down the icing and you only need a tiny bit to dye a lot of icing.

I add the dye with a tooth pick.

Then mix it in gently with a spoon; stirring gently helps pop any bubbles in the icing.

I added just a touch of pink to one bowl, a lot of pink to another bowl plus a touch of purple. I dyed the icing in the tea cup orange and didn't dye the white icing at all.

Set up as many pastry bags as you have colors. I put them in glasses to hold them up while I fill them. You can get pastry bags, couplers, and tips at walmart or the craft store. I mostly use round #2 tips. Couplers allow you to change the tip out without having to get a new bag.

To make the flowers, I first outline the shape of the petal.

Before the outline dries, I begin filling the inside of the petal.

Outline and fill all the petals.

After the petals set for a few minutes, add a white dot for the center.

All the icing will dry flat and smooth. Wait 24 hours before stacking the cookies.