Kentucky Basketball Cookies

Some months ago a friend from my hometown was raising money for genetic testing for her granddaughters for a condition known as Dravet Syndrome and I offered up two dozen cookies for auction as my donation. She posted the auction in two places, so I ended up agreeing to honor both auction winners, because there was no way for those in each place to see the other bids. My friend, Amy, who I have done a number of cookies for in the past, ended up winning her auction and asked if she could wait to redeem her winning bid for her husband's birthday in June, although she immediately made her donation. (BTW: Between both auctions, we raised $110.00 for the cause!) I told her that was fine. She had no idea what she wanted to do, but then it hit me that her husband was a University of Kentucky fan, or at least I thought so. I sent her daughter a message to confirm because I wanted Amy to be as surprised as Mark would be. Her daughter said he would LOVE them. When I delivered them on Sunday, Amy's face and reaction of pure excitement and surprise said it all! :) (Also of note, genetic testing came back and they do NOT have the syndrome!)

I ordered this UK cutter from JB Cookie Cutters, who do 3D printing to make cookie cutters. When it arrived, I was a little disappointed with the size as it seemed awfully small, but it ended up working just fine. They also sent the component parts of the cutter, I guess in case I was doing fondant. Because they were a bit on the small side, they were a bit tedious to do. I ended up doing the white outline first and then filling in, which makes the blue a little lumpy looking, but I was too scared to try it otherwise. Now that I have a point of reference for them with these finished cookies, I think next time (she posted them on FB last night and I already have a request for some for a birthday in September) that I'll do a completely blue flood and fill first and then come back when that is dry and do the white outlines.

Kentucky Basketball Cookies

Kentucky Basketball Cookies

Where Oh Where Have I Been?

After doing all of those nurse themed cookies (over 350) in July, I think I became a little burned out on doing cookies.  Thankfully that seems to have passed now.  Here are a few things I've been up to since the last post here at the first of August.

These really got me back into the swing of things.  I LOVE fall and the colors and the drop in temperatures, although it hasn't yet been a dramatic drop here (in fact, I am still getting tomatoes from my tomato plants - granted not as many as mid summer, but they are still producing and that makes me very happy since I love tomatoes so very much.  But I digress.).  Wasn't sure for whom I was doing these, I just knew that I wanted to do them.  I even took them a step further and used a pumpkin spice roll-out cookie recipe for them and they were DIVINE, not to mention beautiful, if I do say so myself.  I found this recipe for the cookies themselves and made a couple of little adjustments to it.  I increased the pumpkin spice to 3 teaspoons, ya know ya gotta have it spicy!  And I found that I needed 3.25 cups of flour for this recipe to get the dough to the correct consistency.  Oh yea, I didn't use the milk it called for at all because I thought that was weird, but just in case it was for moisture, I just put in a tablespoon of vanilla, since I was planning to bake them immediately.  Here are the results:

Fall Cookies - Autumn Cookies

Fall leaves cookies, pumpkin cookies, acorn cookies

I also did some for my friend's mom who was going to the season opener on a bus to Atlanta for the Alabama game.  These are so very fragile.  My friend made these cute toppers to go on them.

Alabama Cookies

Roll Tide Cookies

My niece asked me if  I would help her with doing some for the Austin Gentry Memorial Scholarship fundraiser.  Her boyfriend's cousin was killed in a car wreck a couple of years ago and his family does an annual basketball tournament to raise funds for the scholarship fund they have set up in his name.  We did 150 basketballs and created bag toppers in his school colors with a logo design very similar to the t-shirts they had for 2013.  

Basketball cookies for Austin Gentry Memorial Scholarship

Then I just did these a couple of days ago for my friend's little girl's 3rd birthday party, which is today.  The theme was Princesses and Pirates.  I used Sofia the First as my inspiration for the coloring.  Sugarbelle gets all of the credit for the pirates. All week I kept wanting to go buy a balloon cutter for these, as well as a different tiara. In the end, I opted not to and simply used a 2.5" circle cutter and part of the negative space to create the bandana tie portion of the cookies.  I was really thinking I would like a more elaborate tiara cutter, but in the end, these worked just fine.  Also note, for some reason, the dark purple photographed very blue, but I assure you it was royal purple on the pirate bandanas.

Princess cookies, Pirate Cookies

Wow, I feel like a total slacker after putting down what little I have worked on for the last 2.5 months, but like I said, I'd hit a bit of a burn out point.  However, I am now looking forward to having lots of fun with some Halloween goodies!