Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Golf Cookies

Who's your caddy? ha!  Did these to celebrate a friend's son making the golf team and his first match. Her photography of them is much better than mine was, so I'm only showing you her pic.

Golf Cookies, "Fore! Cookies"
 Earlier the same week I did a rehashing of the spa face cookies for a spa party for a fellow attorney's daughter's 10th birthday.


Spa cookies
With the dough I had left over from the spa cookies, I decided to try working with colored dough. It makes for a little more work on the front end of the process, but overall is much faster because you only have to wait for outlines to dry and no flooding the entire surface. Wouldn't do it all of the time, but it is definitely an option I will use in the future.



Cookies Made with Colored Dough

My husband's boss had his retirement party on Thursday of this week. Typically the catering department at the college does the retirement parties, but they were off this week because many of the school's departments were closed for the week during spring break. It was very important to my husband that his boss have as nice a retirement party as anyone else gets when catering does it, so I stepped in since my husband's department is comprised of all men. I did a number of things for the party, but did about 50 two inch squares with the school's logo on them. Everyone was so excited about those cookies and was baffled as to how I did them. Of course, I did the logos as Royal Icing transfers and was pretty pleased with them overall, but I did learn that air flow is VERY important in the drying process of the flooding with transfers on top of them. I typically work on plastic trays and stack the trays in alternating fashion for drying because I am sorely lacking in space. I found that the ones that were covered by a section of the tray above it did not dry as well as those that had open air space above them and got some bleeding of the black outline onto the yellow. Fortunately, I was able to salvage them by piping yellow in about a 25 second consistency back on top of the blackened yellow portions. My husband was fine with the ones that had bleeding on them, but I so was not. I thought it made them look dirty and who wants to eat dirty cookies! I also cheated and bought some oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies from Costco as filler, as well as doing a veggie tray, fruit tray, cheese & crackers and nuts. They'd ordered a cake as well, which I put on a separate table. I did lemonade from a clear dispenser with lemon slices floating inside to make it pretty. I also put whole lemons in the clear section at the bottom of the dispenser. We also did coffee. I didn't know many people there, so I was easily able to eavesdrop on comments about the spread for the party and was quite pleased with what I overheard - everyone was pleased and most said the look and the taste were much better than when the catering department does the parties. :)

Birmingham- Southern College Cookie, Royal Icing Transfer



Monday, March 10, 2014

Just Horsing Around

So I did these horse cookies today for a friend's daughter's 15th birthday. She's a horse girl and does tons of shows, so this is the set I put together for her. I used this Sugarbelle tutorial for the horses and this one of hers for the bandanas. Of course, I waited until the last minute to do them, so the first icing layer on the bandanas wasn't quite dry enough for me to try marking on with the food color maker, so the yellow ones ended up with lots of cracks and squished places in them - the orange ones had a couple as well. But from a distance, they look fine! 
Horse Cookies, Bandana Cookies, Cowboy Boots Cookies and Cowboy Hats Cookies