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!

Mixer Cookies

So I figured out what my thank you cookies would be for the mixer my wonderfully fantabulous friend gave me, and when it finally hit me, it was the perfect idea - mixer cookies!  Since I am still learning and trying out my skills, I wasn't quite ready to do a mixer shaped cookie and opted instead to do a royal icing transfer of the mixer.  I found an online image and re-sized it to the appropriate size and set to work on Friday night.  This was a well planned execution of the RI transfers because I knew I would be gone all day on Saturday and would therefore not be able to mess with them until they were fully dry!  I did 12 or 13 of the transfers in case I broke any, even though I was only planning to do six of the big cookies with the transfers on them.

I awoke early on Saturday morning and made myself not touch them, although I so wanted to.  Fortunately I was able to restrain myself.  I made my cookies that morning before leaving so that they would have time to fully cool and have any oil work its way out of the cookies before I was ready to ice them that night.  I measured for what size cookie I would need and determined that I would need a 3x3 square for the best fit.  Sure, it could have been a tad smaller, but I haven't the patience for counting the little marking lines between the inches on a ruler.  Speaking of a ruler, I used two of them to cut my square cookies, since I have found it near impossible to locate a square cutter other than small fondant cutters.  When I returned home that night, I outlined and flooded my favorite chocolate cookies from Lila Loa and placed the RI transfers.

They were then looking so cool to me that I got a bit overzealous snapping pics of them lined up and since it was late at night the overhead light was casting shadows all over them so I was having to hold the camera at an odd angle above them.  No sooner than I thought that I'd better be careful, the camera slipped from my hands and went lens first into one of my precious little treasures.

Since it was still wet, I was able to easily scrape away what was there and redo the cookie.  The same cannot be said for my poor camera. The icing was all over the lens but also embedded in the shutters, so every time I'd clean some out, the instant I opened and closed it, there was icing everywhere again. I decided to give it a rest for the night and see if it would clean better after the icing had dried some. NOPE! The shutters were iced closed on Sunday morning. Of course, I forced them open, so then they were stuck open. Have sent it off to the manufacturer for a thorough cleaning and it is looking like it will be covered under the warranty, which blows my mind, but I am very happy about.  So, the rest of the pics have been taken with our older, much less wonderful camera.

On Sunday morning, I added the finishing touches to them and did the companion cookies, which were color coordinated diamond shapes, elephants with the Alabama "A" on them since my friend is a big Alabama fan and some chevrons, since we both hate all of the chevron stuff we're seeing lately!  One of the finishing touches was something I had never done before, which was "painting" on a finish of silver pearl dust on the mixing bowl.

Notice the mixer in the background

I packed them up in little treat bags with red ribbon inside the lovely polka dotted take-out style box shown in the pics above and packed them for shipping.  I know I'm supposed to wrap them a bit better than I did, but I just decided to see how it would go.  Just got a call from my friend who received them.  She LOVED them and said they arrived mostly intact!  The elephants, which had delicate parts - the legs and trunks - didn't fare so well in shipping.  And from looking at the pics she sent, it seems that some of the mixing bowls lost their handles, which is odd because that isn't even the portion of the mixer transfers I'd been concerned about.  I'd been worried about the little foot under the mixing bowls and had even built up white royal icing under a couple of them.  Anyway, here's what they looked like when they arrived.

I am very pleased with them overall and still have 6 mixer transfers remaining!

BTW:  Is this font color hard on the eyes, or is it just me?

UPDATE: Yay!!!  Canon replaced my camera under the warranty!  Got it via Fed Ex today (3-28).

Valentine's Day Cookies

My next foray into cookies came with Valentine's Day.  Since my hubby doesn't like sugar cookies, I decided to try something a little different.  I did these fabulous chocolate roll-out cookies from LilaLoa and since all I had on hand at the time was Hershey's Special Dark cocoa, I used that.  It made them much darker than the ones shown in the link above and I thought they were FANTASTIC. I will likely always use the special dark cocoa in this recipe.  I also tried the chocolate chip roll-out cookies I found on The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle for others in the Valentine's Day batches.

I did some for the hubs, of course, and I also did cookie packages for my mom, grandmother, mother-in-law and aunt.  After Christmas I always stock up on gift boxes when they are marked down and found that the rectangular lingerie sized boxes were perfect for sets for each person.  I didn't have any pink ribbon on hand, so I made the most fantastic bows from a roll of crepe paper streamers that I had.  I didn't get a pic of the boxes, but I'm not sure if I was more pleased with the packaging or the cookies!  lol

About a week and a half after Valentine's Day my MIL called and told me that she could just not bring herself to eat the cookies I'd given her except for one of the small ones and the back part of one of the large chocolate ones. I asked if she didn't like them. Her response was that they were too pretty to eat.  I told her that they wouldn't keep forever, so she needed to eat them.  She then told me she plans to polyurethane or shellac them and keep them in her china cabinet.  While that was certainly flattering, it absolutely had to be about the strangest thing I'd ever heard!

The day before V-Day, I met my mom and grandmother for lunch and brought them their cookies.  My grandmother had heard of my new found cookie obsession and dug out some of her old cutters for me. I have to include her cute pic here because she was decked out for our Valentine's luncheon (the other pic is the cutters she brought to me that day).

So what did I learn doing these?  If you look closely, you can see the difference in the way some of the cookies are flooded.  In the middle of this project, I began seeing this video from The Bearfoot Baker being re-posted in FB. It is a fantastic tutorial on flooding cookies and I was immediately able to put what I learned into practice. Also, I learned that getting the perfect red is HARD!!!  I started with Americolor Tulip Red and let it develop overnight and found that it still seemed orange-ish to me.  I added some pink, I added some cocoa powder and still didn't like what I was seeing.  So I went to the store and bought Americolor Super Red and added a little to it and let that develop and it turned into a gorgeous red.  However because I'd just sort of willy-nilly kept putting Tulip Red in at the beginning, it turned out a little darker than I would really have liked once the cookies dried, but at least it was then a true red!  Next time, I would just use a bit less coloring overall and it should end up fine.