Finally I got to make baby shower cookies for a girl!
Look at the perfection of this pink… I am obsessed.
I bought the little bow cutter a while back and this is the first (and perfect) opportunity to use it.
I did stripes and polka dots onesies with my 2 different color pinks.
I love these little pink bows!
Each favor got one little onesie and one little bow.
Oh and look at my new stickers!
Thank you to Dion for making a girl baby that I can do pink cookies for! 🙂
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A friend/coworker’s daughter (Mallory!) is leaving for a 6-month exchange program in Australia. Her mom asked me to make her some cookies as a surprise.
I used a teddy bear cutter that came in my Wilton baby set (top cookie) but I turned it upsidedown to make my koalas. Koalas have big ears ya know!
To get an idea of my design, I first sketched it out on the cookie with a yellow food color marker.
Then I outlined all the cookies in black. I will be doing this more often, it made my life 1000 times easier.
I also made some kangaroos!
I teased everyone on fb with this photo of my colors… I didn’t realize how many things could be made with browns and greys until everyone started guessing!
I filled in my little koalas’ bellies, chins, and ears with light grey and let it dry a bit.
Then I came back and filled in the grey. The ears were tricky because I didn’t want to lose the “fluff” definition I made with my black.
So cute already!
Once the grey had dried a little I added some eyes and filled in the noses.
The kangaroos got filled in with brown and light tan for the bellies.
I added a little mouth to a couple of the koalas.
Bye Mallory!! You’re going to have an amazing time!
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A while back I made these butterflies for a special little girl.
With those as inspiration, I made these for another little girl who was turning 1!
They were left unwrapped so that they could be enjoyed by the party guests.
Sometimes simple and sprinkles is all you need!
A young lad in a family that we are very close to graduated high school (from my high school!) last week. He is the youngest son of my old swim coach. I offered to make cookies for his graduation party, and his mom gladly accepted.
I was discussing designs with my mom, and I knew I wanted to do something swimming related because the entire family was very immersed in the swimming world. My mom told me that he was “not that into swimming” and that it was mostly the older brother who had been interested in it. She said the younger only did it because his dad was the coach. I thought she was crazy, but I had kind of put off the idea anyway…
Then came the high school swim team’s awards night. My swim coach was retiring after 18 years of coaching high school, so a sort-of surprise party was arranged to bring in as many old swimmers as possible and flood the audience at the awards night. (I made and brought 6 batches of kettle corn for the event!) It was there that his youngest son, who’s “not that into swimming” won award after award, and it was obvious that he was one of (if not the) fastest/best guy on the team. I concluded that my mom was undoubtably wrong and that I was doing some sort of swimming cookies after all.
(When I told the graduate this story, he laughed and said he was more into swimming than his older brother!)
I ended up just doing one swimming themed cookie, because too many designs would have made me crazy. These are my high school colors, with a “splash” of “pool” blue.
I made graduation caps, stars, circles with our high school initials on them, and fancy plaques with the graduate’s name.
At my high school, the girls wear red robes and the boys wear black.
Here are the swimming cookies. For those not immersed in the swimming world, the red and black dots are lane lines that are strung the length of the pool to separate the lanes. At my high school, our swim team had a tight budget, so our school colors lane lines only came out for special occasions like a swim meet.
Here are all the cookies on the platter. I love how the blue gives it a pop!
Oh yeah and I did one 2012 cookie. I wanted to do more but I thought it would be too fragile.
Go Lancers!
I made this cake for Mother’s Day. Actually I made it twice, one for my mommy, and one for my mother-in-law.
(Sorry the lighting isn’t great in the second one!)
I made 6″ lemon cakes (with the help of my friend Betty), then whipped up some fresh strawberry buttercream. I basically make my standard buttercream, but substituted almost all of the milk for strawberry puree. I added the strawberry first, then slowly added milk a tablespoon at a time until it was the consistency IÂ was looking for.
The picture above makes me happy.
(We’re still working on our kitchen, which is why the walls look funny. It’ll be done soon though, yay!)
Man… this cake was tasty.
Oh yeah and I threw in a middle layer of chopped up strawberries mixed with a few drops of puree and a pinch of sugar. Easy, fresh, and yummy!
After having the first piece at my mother-in-law’s for lunch, my first thought was that I wish I could have more… then I realized I would get another piece after dinner at my parents house that night. 🙂
It was loved by my family members that love sweets, as well as those who don’t care much for them. It was a perfect party cake for a small group.
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I am so excited that these cookies finally had a reason to happen!
My hubby is a die-hard Giants fan and always has been. Naturally I had the choice to either get on board, or be forever miserable and bored and angry about the TV takeovers. Okay, so I still get that way, but only after so many days in a row.
I really enjoy going to the games, and I have gained quite the wardrobe of black and orange over the last couple years.
These cookies were super fun to make because I was given free range to make whatever I wanted. They are for my coworker’s dinner group, who were having a Giants baseball themed get-together.
I have all the necessary parts.
Balls & Bats…
Some of our boys…
Logos… I made these by printing and cutting out a logo, poking holes in the icing with a toothpick, then connecting the dots.
A couple “Fear the Beard” silhouettes… I made these by just eyeballing it.
… and a couple Pandas! Love these guys.
I’m sure I will be doing these again soon. I have so many more shapes I thought of after I had already finished baking.
Black & Orange!!!
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Here are some more popcorn cookies I did.
These were for a 15 year old girl’s Movie Birthday Party.
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A couple days ago I posted another circus birthday, but for a boy. This time, the circus party was for a little girl.
I definitely wanted to do circus tents again, because I loved the way my last ones turned out.
I recently bought a big assorted set of Wilton cutters. (Actually didn’t get too many duplicates, which was awesome! What does everyone do with all those duplicates anyway? I have a bag started..) Anyway, in it was a balloon cutter, and after seeing the balloon cupcakes for my last circus party, I thought the balloon would be a good addition to this cookie party.
(If I weren’t doing these for 2 year olds, I would have stuck a sting to the back of each balloon with a dab of frosting. I figured 2 year olds wouldn’t know to pull it off so I just left it out.)
I came across these adorable circus cookies by Nicole of Life’s A Batch a while back, and the mama for these cookies just loved them when I sent her the link. From these cookies I drew inspiration for the pink elephants.
We also liked the idea for popcorn buckets. I had seen these by Bridget of Bake at 350 a while back, and I also loved the ones from Life’s a Batch, so I combined the ideas into something I could create with my style of frosting/icing.
For the actual popcorn kernels, I was having a hard time deciding what I wanted to do. First I tried using only icing, and planned on layering blobs to create “popcorn.” But because my icing is similar to glaze, it wasn’t holding it’s popcorn shape the way I wanted.
I scraped that idea (literally) and kind of “gave up” and turned to my trusty buttercream… just started creating my blobs. They were kind of bumping into each other and not really looking like kernels anymore.. They needed butter. Problem was, I didn’t have anymore buttercream to dye yellow for the butter. I definitely didn’t want to make a whole new batch just for a couple tablespoons needed. So I winged it and started using icing. Not something I’ve ever done before. I outline in buttercream, fill in icing, and use buttercream for details. Icing on top of blobs of buttercream? What the hell is that?
I’ll tell you. It’s butter. MELTED butter.
Perfection. Accidental perfection.
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What are the chances? Two back-to-back circus birthdays for 2 year olds? One is for a boy and one is for a girl. You will see the girl’s circus birthday later this week.
I want to start by saying I LOVE the circus. I went every year as a kid. Even when I got older and didn’t yet have kids to take with me, I still loved to go. Oddly though, I don’t like clown stuff much. I don’t mind the actual clowns at the circus, but I don’t like clown dolls, pictures, figurines, etc. And I’ve never even seen It or Chuckie or anything scary. I don’t know, they just weird me out. Sometimes when I do to Chevy’s, there’s this clown there who makes balloons for the kids. She kinda creeps me out too. Maybe I just prefer a safe clown distance when they’re real.
Anyway, I didn’t make clown cookies. I didn’t have a good cutter… and what I was envisioning was not translating to paper well and not really “findable” through a google search. For some reason people think clowns in cookie form need to be wearing pointy party hats, although I’ve never seen a real-life clown wearing a party hat. Ever.
So I made circus tents. I found a few images through google search that I liked, but they were made with royal icing, so I had to adapt to my own style. Here is what I came up with:
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I am SO in love with how they turned out!
We also did some #2’s for the 2-year old birthday boy.
I bagged them up to be favors, and attached these cute little tags the mama found. It’s hard to read in this pic but it says “Thank you for coming to my party.”
I also made cupcakes for this circus party. There were red yellow and blue striped cupcakes with cute little toppers…
 
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…as well as a few balloon decorated cupcakes for a special display.
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and here is a picture of the whole treat table!
This is my third attempt at homemade funfetti. The previous attempted were somewhat dry, and did not resemble the perfect moist texture of a boxed cake mix.
I decided to start with a recipe that was created to mock a boxed cake mix, Glory’s Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes. This cake recipe calls for “cake flour.” Now seeing as I don’t sift my flour or powdered sugar, or let my butter properly soften, we all know I’m not going to go to the store to get a specific kind of flour. Luckily, Amanda from iambaker has a recipe for making your own cake flour. The recipe also calls for buttermilk. For the reasons noted above, I am not using buttermilk. Good thing you can make that too.
Homemade Funfetti – recipe adapted from Glory’s Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup + 1 tbsp cornstarch
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 tsp white vinegar (or lemon juice)
4 eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup sprinkles
1. Preheat oven to 350*F. Generously coat 2 8″ or 9″ cake pans with cooking spray.
2. Measure the flour into a small mixing bowl. Remove 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp of the flour and return to your flour bag/bin/container. Add the cornstarch to the flour in the mixing bowl and whisk together well.
3. Add the baking powder, baking soda, and salt to the flour mixture and whisk together.
4. Measure the milk into a glass or small bowl and add the vinegar. Let stand for at least 5 minutes.
5. With your mixer, beat eggs for about 30 seconds. Add sugar and mix well. Add oil and vanilla and mix.
6. Add about half of the flour mixture, and beat until fully incorporated. Then add about half of the milk. Repeat with the rest of the flour, and then the rest of the milk.
7. Quickly stir in the sprinkles by hand, then quickly split the batter between 2 8″ or 9″ pans.
8. Bake for 25-30 minutes. When cake is done, it should spring back to the touch, and a toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean. (Mine got a little over baked. It was still good but ended up being closer to a pound cake consistency rather than a boxed cake consistency.)
9. Let cool completely before removing from pans.
This cake was actually what I made for my final cake decorating class. So the outside is pretty too!
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Cookie Carrie 