Friday, May 31, 2013

Guess Who is One?!?!

Did these for a friend's little boy's 1st birthday.  The party is tomorrow, so I really should wait before posting the pics, but it isn't like anyone actually sees my little piece of blogdom anyway.  Although they turned out really cute, the icing colors dried very, very differently than what I'd had in mind.  Fortunately my friend is super easy-going and said she trusted my judgment if I thought they still looked okay.  I also loved that she just let me run with it - gave me only colors she wanted me to use and let me do my thing, which I love, instead of trying to make something very specific.

This is how they dried.  See, they still look pretty cute, but the colors are so different than the wet version below.

The colors while they were still wet were more what I had in mind, but am still happy with the dried result above.

I'd been looking for the perfect #1 cutter for a couple of months now and found one I really liked called Fancy 1 Cutter from Cheap Cookie Cutters.com, but they were out of stock on it and they never responded to my email regarding making a special order for that cutter, although I did get a response pretty quickly through their facebook page, but it told me to email the question.  So as the time grew closer I ended up settling for a very simple #1 that didn't have a base on it that I picked up at a local bakery supply.  So I cut out twice as many 1's as I needed and cut off the tops of 1/2 of them and then cut out a notch with the bottom of the cutter so that the pieces would fit snugly onto the bottoms of the simple 1's to create a base for them.

You can see the ugly undecorated 1's in this shot and how I notched out the base to attach it to the simple #1.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Move Over Bob Ross

I'm not a fan of funeral flowers and always try to send happy flowers that someone can take home with them instead when I do send flowers. Today I am sending these flowers to the family of a friend for family nibbles after the funeral for their grandmother who loved her flower garden.


I also entered this pic in this month's challenge over on the Lila Loa page which is a wet on wet challenge.  As you can see, there are several types of the wet-on-wet technique in these flowers. Tiny swiss-like dots, a flower outline on top of a fully flooded cookie, weird wonky lines coming away from some of the flower centers, straight lines on the yellow and white ones with the orange centers, not to mention the couple I tried to hide among the pile that ended up sort of marbled with a toothpick - those two were obviously my least favorite.

I really love doing wet-on-wet because I am impatient when I am doing cookies and do not like to wait for dry time in between steps.  And since I am a fly by the seat of my pants cookie decorator, not a planning one, it lets me go from start to finish on a cookie in one step! Then I can move on to the next idea that pops into my head! lol  Most of my centers, well okay it looks like ALL of them, are ones that I made in advance whenever I had leftover icing - still do that because they come in so handy, but as I learn more, I am finding that I have less and less leftover icing each time because I have learned to mix in remaining icing with other colors rather than just dumping what is left.

Thank you Georgeanne for your great giveaways every month!  Of course, that's assuming you actually see this.  Hope you do!








Sunday, May 12, 2013

Cookies for Some of Life's Big Events


My mom's first cousin, to whom I've always been close was having her milestone 60th birthday, so for her surprise party, I did a bunch of her favorite butterflies, since I only have a gazillion butterfly cutters, most of which are the same.  I would have loved to do these in a larger variety of colors, but was asked to have them match the party colors of turquoise and white.  That just gives me something else to try later!


As a belated birthday gift, a friend gave me this awesome customized cookie platter.  It even has representations of my Pac-Man and flower cookies on it!  And btw: it is HUGE!


One of my cousins on my dad's side of the family died last weekend after a prolonged battle with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and I brought these flowers for family eats after her lovely service on a dreary rainy day because they looked happy.  My mother-in-law helped me put together a beautiful flower arrangement for them as well - remember, I've mentioned my MIL before - she's awesome and did a great job on the arrangement.  PTL, you are now healed, dear Suzy.



I did these graduation cookies for the daughter of a long time friend - we actually graduated high school together.  I rushed and scrambled to get them done and in the mail because her party was supposed to be on the 11th, however I had neglected to read an email much earlier in the week from her mom saying that they'd changed it to the 26th because storms were in the forecast for the 11th.  So, dummo me sent far fewer than I'd hoped to do for her and a week before her graduation and a 2 weeks before her party!  But I really like the way the RI transfer of the school (also my alma mater) logo came out, except for the black background seemed to leach through and make the red a little bit speckled.  I've heard from them and they loved them, so mission accomplished.

Albertville High School Graduation Cookies

Here are a few more graduation cookies I did for kids of friends in different schools:

Oxford High School graduation cookies

McAdory High School graduation cookies