Eat your vegetables!

SO I already tried my hand at fruit cookies... I thought it was only fair that I give the veggies a shot.

ok, so it's only ONE vegetable, and I didn't make it for the sake of making a veggie cookie... The carrot cookies I made are really just the first installment for the Easter and St Patty's Day cookies I'm working on.

pipe, flood, pipe some more.

no matter. the carrots are done, and in the event that Rhena and Troy eat them all before I get the bunny heads and eggs done... I want to post them.

better than 'rabbit food'

it's all in the details

Have you had your veggies today?

personal note; the carrot shape itself was pretty easy to do. I have been percolating on doing a petit four or something.. mini carrot cakes? SOMETHING. I definitely will implement the carrot shape to the next carrot-flavored cake/treat I make. carrot cake cup cakes with cream cheese frosting and a little piped carrot on top? perhaps.

Be My Valentine

These are pictures of cookies I made for some families in stepford for Valentine's day. I'm feeling more comfortable with piping, and even used colored sugar on some.



It had been a while since I made some decorated cookies, so overall I was pleased with the final products appearance-wise. (couldn't taste anything cause I gave up desserts for Lent)


Also note that I experimented with chocolate-dipped cookies. I used the cheap 'bark' that they sell in the store, but enhanced the chocolate taste by adding in chocolate morsels to the double boiler. not sure if it was the bark/chocolate ratio, it being applied to the cookies, or just the humidity here in general, but the chocolate never seemed to set all that well.




For these valentine gifts, each kid received their respective letter, decorated especially for them.

for Rushabh:

For Mike and Nancy:

For Alex, Ty, and Sonya:

For AJ and Jacob:

For Maddie and Aidan:

For Ross:

Bake Sale

For the February bake sale, I kept it easy. made four personal pies... 2 cherry and 2 apple... both with the lattice work on top.

as you can see-- the edges got a bit brown, so I either need to employ the foil around the edges or buy one of those fancy bake rings. my cheap ass will probably stick with the foil.

A personal favorite of mine is chocolate covered pretzels, so I rolled up the sleeves and got to dippin'.

I made 13 one-dozen bags of pretzels to donate; in each dozen, there were 4 pretzels that had a decorative pink (dyed white chocolate) squiggles on them. My original attempt was to have that white chocolate be CHERRY flavored, but when I added the cherry extract, the white chocolate melt got stiff. TOTALLY not able to put it in the piping bags. I think because I used imitation extract, so maybe it was a water base, and caused the chocolate to coagulate?

anyways... I scrapped that batch and just went with the plain pink (white) chocolate.

I also took the opportunity to practice piping some chocolate designs on parchment paper.

piping with chocolate is much different than the royal icing. Next time I either need to go with a smaller tip or just have more practice, period. perhaps I might try letting the chocolate cool a little more, too.

S'mores a go-go

Danny's birthday was a camp theme. his party was also 2 days after thanksgiving, so I did nowhere near as much for him as I have done for rhena in the past.

in fact... I ordered the cake.

I know, I know. but the favors were a home-made treat.

Thanks to Susie for the inspiration; she said something along the lines of s'mores for favors, so I ran with it.

dipping the marshmallow in the chocolate provided a little distortion, and I noticed that the graham sticks were inclined to pop out during the heat/cool process.... but overall they came out cute.

they were small enough that even I enjoyed them as a treat; I'm not one for s'mores, so that has to be saying something.

I bagged them up in sets of 2, and tied with a coordinating ribbon.

overall.... they were easy enough to make, and certainly easy enough for mass-production. I would definitely do these again. maybe when rhena does girl scouts or something.

Luau Birthday

For Rhena's birthday, I made a beach-themed cake to go with her Luau-themed birthday party. to compliment the cake (and to make serving easier) I made several cupcakes, covered in 'sand' (cookie crumbs) that each had a decorated surfboard stuck in it.

I was proud of the concept and how the theme flowed into every aspect of the party. the cake? tasted great, but I have a feeling I'll look back at it and be artisticly embarrassed. like maybe next week?

oh well. Rhena loved it, and it held up the label of 'cute' well enough.

And the band played on!

My friend's little boy had a guitar-themed birthday party, so I sent a bunch of guitars and music notes to him as a gift.

The biggest key for producing a large quantity of cookies is to keep the number of DIFFERENT designs to a minimum. one.. to come up with 36 different looking whatevers is exhausting. 2.. having an assembly line of some sorts helps me crank them out much faster.

as a result, I stuck with only 2 shapes for the cookie gift; music notes and guitars. second.. I kept the colors to black, red, blue and green. (oh, and I needed tan for part of the guitar. and white. always need some white)

every 'color' I do requires a loose and a thick batch of royal icing. one for outlining, one for flooding. so definitely keeping the number of colors that I use down helps.

I also had a trial run of shipping them. obviously, I did them overnight. I had them in ziplock bags AND in bubble-wrap. not sure how the final product arrived, but I was very concerned about the 'necks' of the guitars. definitely a breaking point.

oh well.. here are some of the final cookies.

Using Sticks

Tried using sticks in the cookies this time.

The idea was to make the cookies look like flowers blooming out of a ceramic flower pot. I bought a decorative pot then used icing that would compliment the pot.

I think the CONCEPT behind this birthday gift was with merit.. but the final product? meh. not exactly Martha, if you get my drift. The 'grass' made of green construction paper really takes away from the overall look of the gift... but hey. hindsight is always 20/20.

Next time I will NOT just use kosher salt to fill the pot to stick my stems into. I will use a combo of planter's foam AND the rock salt. and maybe a colored sugar on top to look like grass or dirt. no more construction paper, though.

cookie 'bouquet' for Maria's birthday:

detailed look at cookies: