Category Archives: Cookies

Hot August Days Cookies

This year’s theme for my annual company picnic is “Hot August Days.” Whilst perusing cookie cutters online, my coworker came across this 57 Chevy Cookie Cutter.

I was “hired” to bake 300 cookie favors for the picnic. The biggest feat for me to date, and it was a huge success!

All cars were to be identical red chevys. I baked the week before, and froze them until it was time to decorate. I knew 300 cookies was a lot, but until they were taking over my freezer I didn’t really realize how crazy this was going to be.

Assembly-line was the way to go. I started with the tires…

Then added windows and the side panel…

Then outlined the cars…

Filled in the tires, then the cars, then the windows and side panels…

Then finished them off with the side-line and “hubcaps.” I had originally planned on leaving the tires black, but my husband INSISTED that it looked dumb without the white on them. I thought it was the white-walled tires, but my husband corrected me, they are the hubcaps. OKAY.

Then each cookie was bagged and tied with ribbon. Here is the finished product!

Did I mention I have a full-time 8-5 job? This was all done after work hours and on my weekend… thank GOODNESS I had the help of my husband, my mom, and my best friend. There is no way this would have been done without them!

Here is my friend Chelsea (who helped so much with the decorating!!) enjoying a cookie. Or as my mom says, the car is “zooming” into her mouth. Haha…

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Summer Flowers

My mom bought me this cookie cutter from an antique fair:

Super cute little tulip! I had some leftover dough from a batch of cookies yesterday so I made a few…

Whenever I’m not restrained by specific colors I always seem to do pink… maybe because everyone I know that’s having babies is having boys!

I also did a cookie for my neighbor’s 2 year old daughter. I brought her some cupcakes a couple months ago and her mom said she now points towards my house and tells her mom in a very serious tone “Mommy, I need cupcakes.” Haha…

How cute would these be next to the purple daisies I did a couple weeks ago… Garden party anyone?

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More Cookies!

I’m not crazy. There is a reason I have been randomly making tons of different cookies. I also have a confession.

The cookies I have been doing in the past, and up to just a week ago, have been made from this:

Seeing as I am trying to sell my cookies, I thought it was wrong to be making them from a bag. I have not had time to just “play” and find a good recipe because I had been making cookies for people and I didn’t want to experiment until they were for no reason at all.

I started in a safe place – my mom’s recipe box. My mom hasn’t made sugar cookies since I was probably in middle school, maybe even before that. She doesn’t have the patience for rolling out dough and dealing with stickiness. The recipe she had was her mom’s from when she used to make cookies. The result? It was okay. Held up its shape well, and was easy to roll once it warmed a bit (it was seriously a rock when it came out of the fridge). The cookie wasn’t as sweet as the Betty stuff, which can be a good thing since I use so much icing… but it was actually too flour-y I think. It tasted more like a shortbread or biscuit.

A few days later I decided I needed to try again. I have a HUGE cookie order coming up and I need to start baking and freezing ASAP. The next recipe was a complete success. Like, best sugar cookie I’ve ever had. I might tweak it a bit to make it my own, but it’s so good the way it is. You can find it here. That woman is a genius I tell you!

Anyway – to the cookies!

These I made for a very special reason… our offer just got accepted on a house! We have a busy and hard couple months in front of us, but I can’t wait! My house cutter is NOT cute. It is from a Halloween set so it’s technically a haunted house. I did the best I could…

These cuties are for a special mom who just gave birth on Friday night. Her shower cookies can be found here. I used my circle cookie cutter and then chopped the heads off of little gingerbread men for the ears.

The rest are just for fun!

my attempt at a flip-flop cookie. I don’t have a cutter so I used my easter egg and fit a couple pieces together.

The color is better in the first flower picture above, but the dots look better in this one. I will definitely be making more of these they’re easy and so cute!

These are sort of a fail.. I tried to do this, but they didn’t come out as cute as hers. Maybe it would have helped if I would have looked at the picture and done it right!

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Cookie Extravaganza!

I tried a new cookie recipe this weekend. I have been wanting to try a new one for a while now, but every time I make cookie I am making them for someone so I haven’t been able to experiment. I figured while I am making cookies for no reason I might as well try new cutters, techniques, and other ideas I have been bottling up for a while! So forgive the jumping-around of my designs and ideas…

Oh another thing I did different this time was not make my buttercream for the outline and decorating… basically because I was too lazy. So everything is just the icing, and for the most part I just did the same consistency rather than thicken or thin it out to outline or flood. Okay here we go…

The larger cutter came in a set I just received as a gift from some friends. The smaller ones I made myself with my circle cutter and a small crinkle edged circle to take the “bite marks” out of it.  Just like shown toward the end of this post by Sweet Sugar Belle. She is brilliant.

These are also inspired by Sweet Sugar Belle. (See this post.) I thought they were soo gorgeous and I just had to try it. While it turned out nice, it took forever.. and without my precious buttercream I had a hard time keeping my lines straight and my curls curly. The dots were easy so I did a lot of those. 🙂

Next is something I have been wanting to do for MONTHS. My original idea didn’t really come through on these, but there will definitely be more lemons to come! The design was easy and looks fabulous. I totally meant to do limes too, but I forgot and just kept piping in yellow.. Oh well, next time.

A little but of fun…

I don’t know how many people know, and I’m sure I haven’t ever mentioned it here, but I LOVE dinosaurs. I want them in my life more. I haven’t stopped talking about wanting dino cookie cutters ever since my cookie craziness started. While my parents were on vacation, my mom found a few dinos and brought them home for me. So excited! These are just a few trials.. now I just need a brontosaurus and a triceratops and a stegosaurus and I will be set!

These little bite-sized cookies were just leftover colors. Simple.

The recipe turned out okay. It was too flour-y I think. I have another recipe in mind to try next time. Hope that can be soon… I have a HUGE order in less than a month! So excited…

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Baby Shower Cookie Favors

From the beginning of the baby shower planning, one thing remained certain – there would be cookies!! I decided to do them as favors instead of dessert because the mommy-to-be wanted cupcakes.

I did baseballs:

And onesies! Have I mentioned how much I love my onesie cookie cutter?!

Each cookie was bagged and tagged and tied with ribbon. I didn’t get any pictures of them bagged. 😦

All those people that I mentioned left early? None of them paid any attention and no one took home cookies!! I left more than half of them with the mommy-to-be, and I actually brought some home with me. (It’s okay because I went to a Giants game the next day so we had baseball cookies to eat there!)

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More Graduation Cookies

These cookies were my second official order! My coworker’s husband was stuck in an unemployment rut and decided to go back to school. He just graduated from a technical school with a degree in drafting. He was top of his class, and became part of the Alpha Beta Kappa honor society. Best part? His professors helped him get some awesome interviews, and he landed an awesome job right off the bat!

As a surprise, she asked me to make him some graduation cookies for the party she was throwing him this weekend. His robe was navy blue, and one of his many tassels was red, so those are the colors I went with. (The others weren’t as exciting – white, silver, something like that…) At that time I didn’t realize the party was 4th of July weekend, but it turned out perfectly!

I also incorporated the ABK, because that was something he was very proud of.

Can’t wait to do more orders!!

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My Signature Cookie

I have been wanting to make this cookie for awhile now. It’s the idea I came up with for my “signature cookie.” How did I come up with it? Not sure really, all I know is I was sleeping. Yes I dream about cookies… and cakes… don’t judge me.

My husband said “I don’t get it” when I explained what it was going to be. So I made up an explanation for why it works as my signature cookie. So here it is:

I make cookies… & cakes… & cupcakes.. & strawberries…. & more!

Works, right? 🙂

In my dream it was a tiffany blue cookie with a white ampersand, but when it came time to make it I went with white because it’s the easiest to make and if I am going to be making these a lot I want them to be easy! The cutter I used I bought at an antique fair. I also just bought a biscuit/cookie cutter set that has one a tad bigger I might do next time. The little ones are cute though!

I want to take a minute to give MAJOR props to Sweet Sugar Belle for her icing color chart. There is no way I could have made this perfect tiffany blue, or any of the other colors I made last week without her chart! So thanks Sugar Belle!!

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Baby Shower #1

This summer there are 2 baby showers I am helping with (and making cookies for!) Both are very good friends of mine, both due in August (within 3 days of each other), both having boys, and both are having sports themed showers!

Shower #1 is a general sports theme. Another good friend of the mom-to-be and myself helped with the cookies, and she brought her cousin too!

*Pause.* I have to be honest up front. I don’t really do sports. I am getting better at getting into baseball for the hubby, but that’s about it. I especially don’t play sports. I won’t even start on how uncoordinated I am, it’s ridiculous. Nevertheless, I thought I knew what all the balls looked like. Good thing I did some google searches for inspiration and didn’t just wing it…

Here are the cutters I used. I had the circle, but bought the rest at cheapcookiecutters.com.

We made baseballs and baseball bats.  I was planning on making the bats brown since I was doing brown already for the footballs (one less color to make, right?) But my husband said NO, they have to be tan. Fine.

Footballs. I like that the laces are on the top rather than the center, it doesn’t look so “fakey.”

Basketballs. Here is where the inspiration came in. If I had done the “wing it” method, I would have done the basketball like this:

Not saying it looks bad, just a little boring. (Don’t mind the crookedness, I just made it in paint to show my point.) Google inspiration gave me an angled look, which is much cuter and I never would have thought of it on my own!

Soccer balls. Similar situation as the basketballs. Except I really just didn’t know what a soccer ball looked like. And after a google search I realized that most people don’t know what a soccer ball looked like. I don’t want to offend anyone specific so instead of giving photo examples, I will just explain and if you care you can do a google search for “soccer ball sugar cookies” and you can see what I am talking about. Most people make the whole ball out of hexagons (6-sides) when in reality, a soccer ball is made up of black pentagons (5-sides) and white hexagons (6-sides). The second inspiration I got from searching for soccer ball cookies is that most people put the first black part in the direct center of the cookie and expand out. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it looks kinda funny. The one photo that I found that had the correct shapes did not center the black part, but rather did it askew. I loved it!

Okay besides all the inspiration above, I wasn’t going to even do soccer balls unless my friend was coming over to help me. I mentioned I don’t do sports.. that would be ESPECIALLY soccer. My friend however, has played her whole life and so she was in charge of the soccer balls. She did a fabulous job!

And lots of onesies! I love my onesie cookie cutter so much!!

A couple more, just cuz they’re my faves:

The cookies fit in perfectly with all the other sports decorations and with the cake!

Phew! While I didn’t make that many cookies, this was quite a project because there were so many different colors and it was hard to plan how much to make of each color so that I didn’t have to make too much icing or buttercream! It worked out nicely and I now know better exactly how much icing is needed to do a certain number of cookies. I learn more every time!

*PS* Are my picture taking skills getting any better? 🙂

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Sunshine Cookies!

Here in Sacramento it has been yucky weather for the last couple weeks… lots of clouds, lots of rain, and wind mixed in there too. It’s JUNE! Sacramento isn’t supposed to be like this! I  had some leftover dough after doing the graduation cookies last week so I decided to make some sunshine cookies to try to make the clouds disappear and bring on our usual sunny springtime!

I used my spiderweb cookie cutter from my halloween set. And I didn’t feel like making buttercream for just 19 cookies, so I did the outlining in a thicker version of my regular icing (similar to the way the pros do it with royal icing). I used golden yellow and some orange to make them bright and cheery, then ran a toothpick through them for the “firework” look. I did each one different to make a plate of FUN unique sunshine!

Since I did each cookie different, each felt like a work of art. After I finished each one, I would make my husband come look at how beautiful it was. He was trying to play his video games and I don’t think he appreciated the interuptions every 2 minutes…

Here are a couple close-ups:

This one was my favorite…

I forgot to take a picture of the cookies on the bright red platter so I took one on my phone and it turned out TERRIBLE, so you don’t get to see it. Just imagine it looking amazing. 🙂

*The cookies worked! The sun was out all day and it got close to 80 degrees!!*

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Graduation Cookies!

My little brother graduated from college and I made him cookies for his graduation party. He was on the crew team and it has become a big part of his life, so I also wanted to incorporate that into the cookies. Here are the new cutters I bought for his cookies (from cheapcookiecutters.com):

The only boat they had was a canoe and he does NOT row canoes. He gets so offended if you mistakenly call it a canoe or a row boat lol. So I didn’t get a boat.

I was worried about losing the tassel of the cap, but they were easier than I thought they would be.

The oars on the other hand, were a pain in the you -know-what. They are about 4 inches long but only about 1/2 inch wide at the paddle part. the mid section is SO skinny that I had to carefully straighten them all out before I baked them. I broke lots just trying to get them off the pan. Here is what survived:

When it came time for decorating, a few more oars got broken. Good thing I made a ton of those little s**ts.

School colors are dark green and yellow/gold. (I had a hard time getting the green to get dark enough.) The oars were so small I decided not to even outline them, and it worked out okay. I just kept the icing a little farther from the edges and didn’t do too much so it wouldn’t run down.

Here are the final products:

That crew one was my favorite. Too bad it was one of the last ones I did, I would have done more like it!

I did a few funny ones for my brother… he often sat in the seat in the boat called the “stroke seat.” They are kind of like the leaders of pace. I made one that said “Stroke it!” I thought it was hilarious, until I showed my brother the picture and he informed me that I had a misspelling:

The 2- is the symbol for a 2 man race in which each guy has only 1 oar. It’s the boat my brother finished the season racing. (It’s very difficult because if one guy is pulling harder than the other, the boat turns. They have to be precisely together, and the boat is only as fast as the weaker man.) I know my brother was proud of this title, so I did a few cookies with the 2-.

The “row row row your boat” was my husband’s idea. My brother didn’t laugh.

The only platters/trays I had that were big enough for this many cookies were red, and of course not everything goes with red, so I headed to the store to get a new platter or 2 that were more color neutral. I found this serving tray at Target with handles on the sides, and it’s perfect. A couple inches tall so it could actually hold even more cookies if needed!

I officially have a second order placed! A coworker’s husband just graduated so I will be making cookies for their party. Different colors, so it will be fun!

But first, I have a baby shower to make cookies for next week!

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