Monthly Archives: September 2011

Cookies: Z, 6, and Super Mario!

Hello. Today’s blog is brought to you by the letter Z, and the number 6!

That’s right, Zachary is 6 years old! He is the son of a close family friend, and I was lucky enough to get to make his birthday cookie favors.

It is his mom’s tradition to always do Z and his age, so this year was Z and 6.

His birthday party was Super Mario themed, so I there had to be Super Mario cookies as well!

These Marios took me forever. Note to anyone wanting Mario cookies – do not even attempt to ask for more than a dozen. I will not do it. Sorry. Instead of killing myself with a ton of Marios, I decided to do some mushrooms and stars also.

Aren’t they cute!?

Bagged and ready to go…

I am still hoping to get a couple pictures of the birthday boy enjoying his cookies, so when I get them I will add them here!

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Clothes Cookies

My aunt was invited to a CAbi party. I had never heard of it, but I got the feeling it was like a Tupperware or Pampered Chef party, only with clothes. (The link explains it a little better.)

She offered to bring cookies. My aunt and I have made cookies together for years. Starting with just Christmas, then blossoming to other holidays. Now she was just going to make the cookies herself, but she thought it would be an awesome idea (and very sweet idea!) to do them together and help me get some promotion!

The only “clothing” cookie cutter I had was my beloved onesie, so I had to look online for other things. I found a very cute dress at cheapcookiecutters.com.

She also wanted a pair of jeans… the only cute pair I could find online was copper, so we broke down and ordered it.

This is where I had to get creative. All of the shirts were cut from my onesie. I cut and shaped some capris from the jeans cutter. From the dress cutter I made some skirts. I also did a couple bathing suits and panties from the onesie cutter.

This was so much fun! It totally reminded me of paper dolls. In the end we had a few sets of pants and tops that matched!

My aunt had to take them home with her when we we done, so I didn’t get to photograph every piece of clothing we did. (Oh and it was about 11pm so that’s why the picture lighting is awful.) Here are some pics of the whole trays…

Here they are at the party, “merchandised by category.”  Haha..

There are some of my signature cookies in the pic above.. and I made extras of the pink daisy cookies so that we could have those with the clothing cookies…

Thank you to my aunt for the great PR! These were so fun to make!

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Pink Daisy Cookies

Star of the week at school again – this time for the older sister of the butterfly cookies. Pink was a must, and daisies were the shape of choice.

I love my daisy cutter! (Found at an antique fair.)

I planned on doing centers like the purple daisies I did awhile back, but after just one cookie my hand was killing me and it didn’t look as cute. The swirl lets you see all the sprinkles anyway! (Kids love sprinkles!)

All bagged up and ready to go!

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Skeleton Cookies, No Icing

So the last time I made cookies without icing was because a friend of mine can’t have dairy right now (she’s breastfeeding and it upsets the baby). Well, I never got the chance to get them to her before my husband ate them! In his defense, he didn’t realize they were being saved. So I had to try again to make some cookies for her.

I bought a set of 3 wilton halloween cookie cutters because I really just wanted one of them – a skull and crossbones. I see a future with this cutter that I can’t express too well without icing. Maybe sometime soon I will make more skulls and try everything I imagined.

For now, these are pretty fun:

 

I don’t really like the way the lips turned out.. My tip was too big and I was too lazy to change it. I like the heart eyes though!

That’s all for now. Lots more cookies coming this week!

Oh and we are moving at the same time. Our (first!) house should close tomorrow or Friday! 🙂

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Marshmallows!

This is the first thing in a long time that I could not stop eating.

It’s not hard.

Just fun, easy, and yummy. Very yummy.

Oh and I made it look fancy.

If I had had more time, or if I wasn’t moving right now and had a ton of my kitchen packed up, I would have done colored candy melt drizzles too…

I also made some small ones…

I just skewered them on toothpicks. They were a little harder to dip/roll in the chocolate, but they came out so cute!

The white ones above are dipped/rolled in white candy melts then covered in sprinkles, then drizzled like the chocolate ones.

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Cookie Truffle Balls

I found the inspiration for these here. Brilliant! Why did I not think of this sooner when I heard about cake pops? These are basically the same idea as cake pops/cake balls, except instead of using cake, you use cookies!

I baked my normal sugar cookie recipe, making sure to cook them a little longer than normal so they were extra crispy. Then I turned them to dust in my food processor. I guess you could put them in a bag and smash them if you wanted, but I didn’t want to end up with chunks. I used almost a full batch of cookies. (I baked a few for a friend with the same batch, pics of those soon.)

I mixed in cream cheese. I used my KitchenAid for this because it would have taken me forever to mix it in by hand. I just kept adding more until it all started to stick together in a huge clump. it came out to about 1 1/2 bricks. (Oh and I used the kind that’s 1/3 less fat.)

Then I formed balls (just like cake pops) and set them on wax paper. I did a few with sticks, but I left the rest just as balls so they could be cute little truffles.

They sat in the fridge/freezer for a few minutes, then they were dipped in candy melts. These I was making for a friend’s birthday, so I did her favorite colors.

The purple candy melts you buy were kind of a weird color so I added some purple food coloring (Gel kind only, you don’t want to add liquid to candy melts!)

Oh and she has a twin, so I made some for him too. His “favorite” colors are all his sports teams’ colors. I had a choice between red-gold (49ers), purple-silver-black (Kings), or orange-black-white (Giants). I chose red-gold because the ones I was making for his sister were going to be purple and I wanted them to be different. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do gold when I saw these at Michael’s:

They look perfectly gold! So I made them and they looked awesome. Then I tried to move them and they got really messed up and I got SOO mad at myself for trying to move them… so I remade them. Don’t they look awesome!

THEN my friend finally texts me back… see when I bought the “gold” candy melts it occurred to me that some people  are allergic to peanuts. I have known these guys all my life and I figured he wasn’t, but it is still important to ask. Turns out, he IS allergic. Yeah, all his were completely done at this point. (Plus there’s the 3 that I had to redo because I tried to move them.) GRRRRR….

So then I had to redo all of his in red-white. They still turned out great but not as “wow” as the gold ones. Oh well. 🙂

…and then I needed a ride to dinner with them and the friend driving said she’d only pick me up if I made her some treats too. Anyone okay with getting paid in treats  is fine with me! It’s not hard to guess that these were my favorites!

Everyone at work is getting the rest, so I just made them fun colors with what I had left. The ones with sticks actually came out pretty cute too.

I bought these cute little treat boxes at Michaels for the ones that were gifts. I was just disappointed that I couldn’t fit more in each one. Next time I will get the “candy” sized papers and make the balls a little smaller…

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Wedding Cookie Favors

Okay bravo if you can follow along with this: the daughter of a coworker of a family friend was getting married, and wanted some cookie wedding favors.

Lots of baking…

Color = Purple. Dark purple is hard to make! It took me like 45 minutes to get it dark enough. It was worth it, it came out great!

I tied little tags onto each bag with the bride and groom’s names and the wedding date. Love that it’s 9/10/11!

I had a couple blank cookies leftover, so I did roses out of the purple buttercream to pair with the extra Monogram cookies. These are extra, so they are just something extra and special for the bride!

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Caillou Cookies

I received a special request for some Caillou cookies for a themed birthday party. I had never heard of Caillou, so I had to do some research!

This is what I learned:

1. Caillou is pronounced [ky-you].

2. The show, which airs on PBS is based on a book series.

3. The author created Caillou without hair or distinguishing features (besides the fact that he’s white) so that all kids can more easily identify with him.

I used my circle cookie cutter, and the top of my onesie cookie cutter. I chopped off the arms so that I basically just had the shoulder section. Stuck it to the circle, and they were ready to bake!

The basic outline is pretty easy. Since I was outlining the whole thing in black, I used a pretty small tip.

This was the first time I made “fleshtone” icing. I had to look up what colors to mix. In the end I kind of played it by ear, and it worked out easier than I thought.

I felt confident going into these cookies, but I got nervous when it came time to put the face on Caillou. So I took it in parts.

It ended up being easier to do than I thought. Every picture of Caillou his facial expressions are slightly different. So if the eyebrow or mouth was a little crooked, it still looked great!

The mom sent me some of these cards to attach, since the cookies are favors. Aren’t they adorable!?

I received an email from the mom last night after the party was over:

OMG I just want to say thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! You are truly amazing, I couldn’t believe it when I saw the cookies. They look just like the picture. My daughter along with all her friends were so excited. All my friends were impressed as well. I’m sure you will be gaining some more customers. I will be ordering cookies from you for every birthday of my son and daughters… Your cookies made this party. You rock and you’ll be hearing from [us] again and again!

I guess she liked them! 🙂

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Non-Edible Deliciousness (Again)

I am in LOVE with dessert jewelry pieces I see on Etsy.. How cute are these:

I found these in SweetCherryDesigns1‘s store. I also love the “fruit salad” items.

Oh and these just make my mouth water…

These are from KawaiiCulture‘s shop. I love everything she makes. The animal crackers are adorable, and the tomato and avocados are perfect!

I have never made macaroons, but they facinate me and I may have to try them sometime soon. I love that they can be made in basically any color. And I love this:

This is from the Etsy store of SillyChic. The sandwiches and banana are awesome and so realistic looking!

Okay that’s enough of that for now. I am in love with food jewelry! One of these days I am going to have to break down and buy myself something. 🙂

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Beer Pong Cookies

It was a friend’s birthday today and her mom wanted me to make her some special cookies. We were trying to think of the cookie to make for her, and it hit me what would be perfect. Last time we went camping, she stomped all the boys at beer pong! How awesome would beer pong cookies be?!

Well obviously there is no “beer pong cup” cookie cutter. I went through everything I had and nothing would work.. I was planning on making a stencil and cutting them out by hand, until I visited a couple bakery stores in my area and found a flip-flop cookie cutter:

Same basic shape as a cup, I just had to bend the left side out a bit and square up the top and bottom and I was ready to go…

I decided to outline the ball in black so that it would stand out well against the white of the inside of the cup.

I outlined the ridges…

I filled the red sections separately so that they would each “heap” separately and really show off the ridges that make it the “red cup.”

I filled in the balls white. The inside of the cups I added the tiniest amount of black possible, just to make it a slightly different color from the white of the ball.

Cookies were bagged and tied with ribbon…

…after I arranged a red cup beer pong set-up!

So the birthday girl lives in Chicago. Yeah, I’m in California… first attempt at shipping. We used LOTS of bubble wrap, and chose overnight FedEx.

…and….. not a single cookie broke! Every single one made it safely. And the birthday girl loved them!

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