Hello Kitty Cookies (and a few more things)

Guess I need to get back in the habit of making posts here again. I got kind of burned out on doing cookies over Christmas and didn't do any at all in January, but once Valentine's day began approaching, the bug bit me again. Here's what I have been up to since Christmas, from now backwards.

Hello Kitty Cookies

I was terrified about tackling the Hello Kitty bodies. Not sure why exactly, but I was. I used the Sugarbelle trick for marking the eyes and nose, and even used it on the center of the bow for both the face ones and the body ones, except I used a needle instead of a push pin. On one of the bodies, I tried marking the body with random spots to give me a feel for it and it came out okay, so after that I just jumped in and did them free hand. The broke these up into a number of steps, which worked well, as the parts had a little drying time before I finished all of them and was ready to begin the next step. I started with the center of the bow, then moved on to the rest of the bow. You may find my next step odd, because it was truly a stab in the dark, but I next did the dress. Actually, I think I ended up combining the steps of the remainder of the bow and the dress into one step after I got a few under my belt. I then outlined the kitty face, ears and around the insides of the bow; then I filled the face and paws. At that point, I went to bed, because I needed a lot of drying before moving on to facial features. When I awoke, I marked the faces using the template I made with parchment paper by tracing the cardboard picture that was attached to the cutters when I bought them. I tried one set of whiskers with the black icing I was using for the eyes, but it was far too runny and I was too lazy to mix up a thicker second bottle of icing, so I just did the whiskers with a black food color marker, which I think looks great.

Hello Kitty Face Cookies

Valentine Cookies

Champagne cookies, Valentine Cookies

I am not sure what the heck was going on with the champagne - both the bottles and the glasses. I messed up mixing the color and added bronze and it ended up darkish orange-ish. So to compensate, I added a ton of white food coloring, which is super watery, along with some shades of yellow gel icing. I think I must have had way too much coloring in that little bit of icing because it just didn't want to dry and was a little odd in consistency as it did finally dry (used the oven on warm 170 degrees for an hour), even though it was made from the same batch of icing of all of the other cookies shown with it. Lesson learned about using too much coloring to make up for mistakes. Just start over.

Valentine Cookie Bouquet

Eye glasses cookies

Eye glasses decorated cookies

Christmas decorated cookies

There were so very many Christmas cookies that I wanted to do, but just simply ran out of time to do. I had about a gazillion cutters laid out to use over the month, but just never got to many of them. Here are the ones I did get to. The cookie wreath and the reindeer were last second throw-togethers with leftover icing. Actually, the wreath uses both glaze and royal icing because I didn't have enough of either left over to do them any one way and the glaze is much easier to mix up, but I am just not thrilled with the finish of those and my sloppy work on them. But the person I gave them to didn't seem at all bothered - don't think she even noticed, as she raved and raved over them.

Christmas Tree decorated cookies

Holly leaf Christmas cookie wreath

Reindeer Christmas decorated cookie