Kari's Baby Shower

My cousin Kari had a lovely baby shower in January and I was in charge of making a favor for the guests. I was a bit weary of making and decorating 40+ sugar cookies but with my mom's help and a very simple idea, it really wasn't that big of a project. I like round cookies the best, plus, I think they are the most fun to decorate so, round it was. I found miniature cookie cutters in an animal theme, picked up some fondant and started decorating. EASY! Plus, I think they turned out pretty cute!

Christmas Santa Cookies

As usual, my assignment for Christmas Eve dinner is to bring sugar cookies. They do take quite a while but I don't mind making them. And actually, I chose a simple pattern this year and it didn't take too long at all. Of course, I had my lovely sister, Megan helping out a little to put on Santa's belt buckle.

I got the idea for these cookies here.

Cookie Decorating Giveaway!

Check out this site for a totally cool book with 1000 ways to decorate cookies and cupcakes! YUM! With 1000 decorating ideas, you can never go wrong!

http://thebakingsheet.blogspot.com/2010/11/giveaway.html

Candy Corn Cookies

I guess I haven't made or attempted any new cookie projects or treats lately but now, it's kind of getting back in season....Halloween delicious treats, then Thanksgiving delicious treats and then of course, Christmas delicious treats. These delicious treats mainly include sugar cookies, but yesterday, I tried out some Candy Corn Pinwheel cookies. These cookies don't look like candy corn, but I did use the same colors - yellow, orange and white. I used my mom's recipe for Candy Cane cookies (a personal favorite) to make there:

1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. shortening
1 c. powdered sugar
1 egg
2 1/2 c. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Then, I split the dough into thirds, colored them, rolled them out. I stacked all three colors together, rolled them a little more to squish the colors together and then I rolled the whole thing into a big log to slice up. And there you go - Candy Corn Pinwheel cookies.

Flour and Sugar Giveaway

Here is a totally cute blog that is giving away something else totally cute - a cupcake kit. Check it out here:

http://www.flourandsugarthoughts.blogspot.com/

Here is just one of the cool kits you can choose from!

4th of July Cookie Bouquet

This year for the 4th, I decided to try out a cookie bouquet. While doing this I realized that there are two different types of cookies, a delicious cookie and a beautiful one. Beautiful ones are the kind people make to build bouquets (though I think mine are pretty nice, there is room for improvement - I'm still learning!). Delicious cookies are the kind I like to eat! I still made my normal recipe for cookies but I think the true secret in my cookies is the butter-cream frosting. I have been looking at other people's cookies and I determined that there is absolutely no way they use butter-cream frosting. Everyone uses royal icing - the kind that turns rock hard and doesn't taste good - hence, the beautiful cookie but not the delicious cookie. So I added almond flavoring and a little bit of shortening to my royal icing to add flavor and softening power! We'll see if it works!

Happy 4th of July everybody!!

Baby Shower

Okay - so I haven't updated this blog in forever and this update doesn't contain cookies OR cupcakes. But, it does have delicious treats and I wanted to remember them for future use.

On Saturday, my friend Bri and I hosted a baby shower for another friend who is due in June. I made a strawberry topiary for refreshments and also for decoration. I got this idea at a family girls night. One of my cousins made one and I loved it. She served it with sour cream and brown sugar. I've heard it is quite delectable but I won't touch sour cream unless it's baked into something so instead I made a fruit dip out of:
1 jar Marshmallow Puff
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
I know lots of people will use strawberry cream cheese but I just like it plain.
I love these topiaries because they really do look good once they are finished. Some of the downfalls of the topiary are:
1. It takes a TON of strawberries - well, not really a ton but about 4 pounds so try to get them when they are on sale.
2. Nobody eats the strawberries, they think it's just for decorations. In fact, some people at the shower thought it was fake - though the smell of strawberries was quite strong all around!

Put the two together and you end up with a lot of strawberries after the party! Luckily, I had another party that I was hosting after, so I just filled in the openings and re-used it. I've been eating strawberries daily since, but I absolutely love them so I'm okay with it.

This other picture is of the party favors I handed out. I got this idea from my cousin. They are Junior Mints wrapped in colorful paper. She used "It's a Girl" wrappers but my friend doesn't know what her baby will be yet so I just used pink, blue, and green papers.

Pat's 27th B-Day

Pat turned 27 last year. For his birthday, we got together with friends to play Steel McRad, a totally awesome and unique frisbee game. In honor of the game, and of course Pat, I made him a Wham-o Frisbee cake. I know, I could have done a bit better on the roundness of the frisbee but I'm learning. It was my first time using fondant - props to those who know how to use it to create masterpieces, you're amazing!

The cake turned out quite tasty - yellow butter cake with lemon butter-cream filling.

Christmas Cookies

Christmas time is the best time to bake cookies. I try to have all Christmas present shopping done before December so that I can bake cookies all December long. When my brother comes in to town, he likes to have 100 sugar cookies - frosted. That's a chore. One year I actually decided to go along with it since I LOVE them. I've learned my lesson, but I still like to bake up a batch.

Here are the cookies I made for Christmas Eve with Pat's family. It was fun to make them though I've learned to use a different red food coloring. This one is the Wilton's "no taste" red but it was just too pink. Next time I will try out the gel.

Fall Cookies

Well - here are our Fall/Thanksgiving cookies. No - nothing spectacular, but that's because we had to frost them quick or else they'd be eaten before we could frost them at all! You see, the first attempt at making these cookies ended up in my sister's family and me eating all the dough (yes, a double batch) before we could turn out any baked cookies.

The second attempt I made the dough AND baked the cookies before any of my sister's kids got home from school. That was successful and luckily, I had my other sister to help get them frosted before any of them disappeared. And - in all honesty, sometimes it doesn't matter how elaborately decorated a cookie is right? It's mainly the taste that counts!

And so it begins.....

I have always, always, always enjoyed cookies. I looked in my baby/childhood book and on one page the question "What does Anna-Lisa spend her allowance on?" was asked. A sibling was filling this page out for me and the reply was, "Anna-Lisa doesn't spend money, she saves it. Unless it's cookie day at school."

Cookies are my most extreme tasty treat weakness - not chocolate, not cakes, not ice cream.....it's really just cookies. My most favorite cookie is a sugar cookie with pink frosting so you can imagine how much I love Valentines Day! One of my other extreme weaknesses if hydrangeas, the flowers above that I crawled through at the Bellagio so I could get my picture taken with hydrangea's surrounding me.

Back to cookies - I'm starting this blog up for my own sake. I want to capture all the sugar cookies and cupcakes that I create and store them somewhere. I figured a blog is as good a spot as any so here goes. Well, I just found out that my St. Patrick's Day cookie pictures that Pat took on Thursday were all erased on accident....I didn't think that losing pictures happened anymore in the digital age but I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles! (I'm sorry, sometimes I can be horribly pun-y.) And of course, we can't take anymore pictures because the cookies are gone. It's Sunday - I told you sugar cookies are my weakness! So, to make sure none of my other pictures get lost, I am going to start posting them all up.