For valentine’s cookies, I always do the traditional colors, then throw in purple. This year, inspired by this beautiful set by iambaker, I decided to go light blue instead. Enjoy!
Love these sweet pink and white ones…
This one is my favorite!
Love the little bow on this one…
Can never go wrong with sprinkles, especially festive non-pareils!
My husband said the blue one below looks the yummiest… the big heart sprinkles on the pink one I found at the 99 cent store!
Filed under Cookies
My family loves going to crab feeds… we go to at least 3 a year.
I just recently learned that crab feeds are a Northern California thing. I had no idea that the rest of the world didn’t enjoy all-you-can-eat crab feasts like we do! I’m sorry people that live everywhere else… I feel very bad for you. A piece of my heart belongs to crab. ❤
One of the crab feeds my husband and I attend each year is put on by my mother-in-law’s church. They always have a silent auction as well as a live auction to raise money, and this year I decided to make some treats for them to auction off. (I thought it would be in the silent auction, but I was lucky enough to get my items auctioned off live. A little embarrassing because my husband’s grandpa kept trying to buy them, but I know it was out of love!)
The theme of this particular crab feed is “under the sea,” and there are cute decorations everywhere of not only crabs, but fish, frogs, and starfish. I made my cookies to match the theme.
I did shells with the same wet-on-wet technique I used here. Just do lines of icing right in the wet background…
Then trace a toothpick through to create swooshes. Technical term.
I also did some fun little bubbles…
Some bright fishes…
And some crabbies of course! So glad I decided to add sparkles to these guys. It really made them pop!
Here they all are, ready for the auction!
I also made a tray of cake pops. They’re not really anything special enough for their own post. I got a little crazy with the sparkles on these but I love how they turned out!
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…
Ever since I made rainbow cupcakes I have been doing colored yellow cake every time I make cupcakes. For the baby shower I helped throw, it was the perfect dessert.
The theme of the baby shower was baseball – more specifically Giants vs. Cardinals. The mommy-to-be is a die hard Cardinals fan and the daddy-to-be is a die hard Giants fan. It seemed only fitting!
All decor was red (Cardinals) and orange (Giants) with occasional blue for their little baby boy. The baby shower invitations were designed to look like baseball game tickets. Adorable.
Anyhow, the cupcakes. Half were red and blue (Cardinals) and half were orange and black (giants). The Cardinal cupcakes got red buttercream frosting and a Cardinals pick, and the Giants cupcakes got orange buttercream frosting and a Giants pick.
I want to take a moment to say anyone who has ever made their own cupcake picks – you’re crazy! I am never doing it again! It took forever. Although I have since seen those cute little paper cutters at Michaels that totally would have saved my hand from cutting out all of those stupid little circles! Live and learn…
Filed under Cakes
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!!
My coworker’s daughter has worked for years, in one way or another, for the republican party. It’s a huge part of her life, and she is about to leave to start a 6 month internship in DC. For her last day of work, her mom wanted to surprise her with a couple dozen custom sugar cookies made by *me!*
We ordered these cookie cutters from cheapcookiecutters.com:
I was originally going to just do the washington capital cookies plain white with white nonpariels or something… my husband said that would look dumb, so he helped me figure out which details to include and which to leave out. It was a lot of piping, but I was really happy with how they turned out. The elephants were lots of fun, I had to just google for ideas. I have star sprinkles so I just picked out all the white ones!
Here is the final product:
These may have earned me a HUGE project this summer, we will see!
Filed under Cookies
Cookie Carrie 