Flower Cookies for A Memorial Service

The younger sister of a childhood and high school friend died in January after a five year battle with brain cancer. Since I would be unable to attend the memorial, I contacted a friend who lives near me, who I knew would be going and sent these flower cookies in my stead. It was my understanding that they were to serve desserts after the memorial, so I thought these would be perfect. Guessing they may have ended up in the trash, as they didn't make an appearance after the memorial and my old friend isn't much into sweets. She did express her appreciation, though. It is the thought that counts, though, right?

Flower Cookies, Memorial Service Cookies

Cookies and Cupcakes from Mother's Day

So I was pretty well burned out after the gigantic cupcake order and didn't really get into doing a lot of cookies for Mother's Day. I had agreed to do a small bouquet for my friend's mom and just held out some of the dough from when I did the beach cookies to do them. And while I was doing those, I cut out a ton of mini flowers to use as decoration on the cupcakes I decided to do for Mother's Day for my mom, grandmother and mother-in-law, because those are so much faster to knock out. Here is a really bad pic of the bouquet my friend and I put together for her mom:

Mother's Day Flower Bouquet

For the cupcakes, I did red velvet with cream cheese frosting and butter yellow with peanut butter buttercream. I used this recipe from the Cake Mix Doctor for the red velvet ones. And for the cream cheese frosting, I ended up just sort of winging it after reading several recipes. I added extra powdered sugar to make it very stiff. This is what I ended up using:

              2 8oz. blocks of cream cheese

              2 sticks of butter (1 cup)

              1T vanilla

              2T milk

              6 cups powdered sugar

For the peanut butter I totally cheated and just used the Duncan Hines butter golden cake mix and then used the Wilton Peanut Butter Buttercream recipe, although I may have had a little extra peanut butter in there, just because I wasn't too precise in my measurements with it, since IMO, one can never have too much peanut butter! ;)  Again, I didn't get a good pic. This one is after they'd traveled over 100 miles and then picked out of the bunch by my cousin and taken to her house while sitting on a paper plate covered with a paper towel. The peanut butter one looks horrible. Oh yeah, I decorated the peanut butter ones with wedges from round chocolate cookies that I had the foresight to cut out while making the flower bouquets. I used an Ateco #828 open star tip for the peanut butter ones, which I'd just bought the day before. 

And do you recall me mentioning my niece who helped me with the Derby cupcakes? Well, she already loved to bake, but now, she's into decorating, too, after that day and the fun we had. I picked up an Ateco #809 and #829 for her and late last night, I got a notification that she'd tagged me in her facebook photo of her baking project from last night. She did 70 minis to take to surprise the 5th graders at Boaz Elementary school, who she'd done her student teaching with this semester (she graduated the day after we did our Derby cupcakes and is now looking for a teaching job). Makes my heart proud!

Elisabeth's cupcakes

 

 

 

And here is her photo compilation of our cupcake making day at the donut shop and her quickly learned petal rose. Check out that ginormous donut!  Ha!

Cupcakes and Donuts with Elisabeth

 

Flowers from Colored Dough

A friend was having her grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony and wanted some cookies for the event. The place is called The Wildflower Boutique so they wanted some flowers. We'd talked about various things and she decided that she'd like colored dough with icing outlines. I checked out their logo and picked the colors from that. I wasn't thrilled with them, but she loved them, so I guess that's what matters! I used lots of centers I'd made over time with various leftover Royal Icing, which really speeds up the process since they are pre-made and completely dry already.  Here are the pics of the finished product and the process.

The Wildflower Boutique, Wildflower colored dough cookies

The Wildflower Boutique, My hands after mixing the purple into the cookie dough

The Wildflower Boutique, Finished cookies in their wrapping

The Wildflower Boutique, Colored Cookie Dough

The Wildflower Boutique, Owners Paige Trussell and Cheyenne Pye

 

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

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!

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

Operation "Spread a Little Sunshine"

After doing Easter cookies and birthday cookies over the last two weeks, I told my husband on Sunday that I was over doing cookies for a while.  Yeah, that lasted about a day or so.  But since I didn't have anyone specific in mind, I wasn't sure what I was going to do.  Then I decided I'd just do some simple flowers - only mixed up two colors of icing - pink and yellow.  I did about 3 dozen, well it actually came out to 34 cookies and then with quality control and all, there ended up being 32 to divide up.  I'm a huge Andy Griffith Show fan and always have been.  There's an episode in which Andy sings a line out of a song that goes, "Spread a little sunshine every day.  Spread a little sunshine every day.  Help someone along life's way.  Spread a little sunshine every day."  That episode was on in the background one day while I was working on cookies to surprise a friend and it just fit.  So now, I call surprising people with cookies "spreading sunshine."

Yesterday I packed up six boxes of 5-6 cookies each and sent them all over the U.S. to various friends.  A couple went here in my home state of Alabama, one to Memphis, one to Denver, one to Florida and one to Kentucky.  Only one of those people knows to be on the look-out for them, because I knew she'd had trouble with a neighbor taking packages from her house, so I had to get her work address from her.

Just got word that the nearest one has been delivered!  She was totally surprised and was having a really bad day worrying about her son's friend who'd had a very serious car accident on his way to school this morning and was air lifted from the scene.  She said it could not have come at a better time.  (Also, good news came about the young man shortly thereafter - he is stable - has some broken bones, but overall okay).  Here's the pic she took and posted to Facebook thanking me:

Here is what she said, which brought me to tears:

"Today my heart was heavy.______ had a doctors appointment(which he received awesome news) and I learned of one of _____'s classmates having a horrific accident in which she and her brother were injured. I was in tears and looked in the window and saw I had mail. I had a small box addressed to me. I had a box of cookies ( so springy and beautiful) from a friend. I had admired her cookies for weeks. I always say it is the little things that mean the most and today it was AWESOME!!! How or why she thought of me was amazing but she did and I needed a reason to smile. In her note she stated to pay it forward and I will. Thanks to all of you who love me for being me. Thank you Beth:)"

Yes, that is a little hint of green you see in the center of the smaller flower, but that was leftover green from the birthday cookies, so I did only mix two colors for these flowers.  I also cheated doing these by using pre-made centers for them.  Seems that I can never mix up just the right amount of icing (although I came pretty close this time around) so I always make dots and flower centers with the leftovers.  Since I wasn't doing dimension with these, just an outline and flat flood, then dropping the pre-made centers on them, I knocked out these almost 3 dozen very quickly.  I actually did the yellow ones on the same morning that I mailed them out in the afternoon - just put the fan on them immediately after getting them ready.  I'll post pics and updates to this post over the next couple of days as I receive word that the surprises have arrived.

UPDATE:  Have received word that packages #3 and #4 have also arrived.  Didn't get pics of both of those, but both were very surprised.  For package #3, I just giggled to myself the other night when she commented on one of my posts on Facebook that she wished she lived closer so she could try my cookies.  All the while, she was already on the list to send some to the very next day.  She had no idea and was completely shocked when she received them today.  Looks like spreading sunshine is making me smile a lot, too! Here's the pic of package #4 that made it to Colorado:

There are actually 6 cookies in this pic. I bagged them back to back.

I'm pretty much stalking the USPS tracking page to see where the packages are in their transit.  I'm a little concerned about the one headed to Kentucky, as there has been no update on its status since it was sorted in Birmingham in the wee hours between Wednesday and Thursday.  All the others had/have detailed information for each stop along the way to the various destinations.  Wonder when I should begin to worry. 

UPDATE #2 Got word last night after posting this that package #5 arrived at the end of a very stressful day filled with doctor's appointments.  She said the timing was perfect and that she and her husband quickly gobbled them up.

Also heard today that the seemingly lost Kentucky package found its way to its destination today.  My friend said her son gave them the seal of approval, which is huge because he's not a big sweets eater!  I must have done an okay job packing these (unlike the mixer cookies) because all 3 of the packages that I got pics of seem to be intact!

Easter Cookies

So I've been working on cookies for Easter off and on all week and here's a sampling of all of the ones I did. I think there are about 70 all total:

Easter Cookies

Because I was doing so many, I just really played around and worked on trying to learn different techniques.  I had already planned to do the sheep with a round flower cutter I had, but among that huge lot of 27 cutters that my mother-in-law gave me was an oblong flower that I decided was even more perfect for them.  I did all sorts of things for the texture on them - tried Cornelli lace, dots, swirls, you name it.  

Easter cookies.  Sheep cookies

I had a lot of fun with the carrots, which I did in diagonal sections in order to give them some texture.  I'm super slow when working on cookies, so knocking out about 2 dozen of those in about an hour was a feat about which I was VERY excited!  

Easter Cookies.  Carrot Cookies.

On the small hopping bunnies, I decided to try out doing wet on wet roses.  They came out okay, but I definitely need some work on that technique.  I'd also try different colors next time, but I was just using what I had left over because the thought of making and coloring more icing was just too much for me.  Those little crosses were surprisingly difficult for me - I think mainly because my icing was likely a little too thin for how narrow they are.  I loved doing the eggs with the bunny sitting in the grass.  Of course I had to throw in some flowers, too and I had a new cutter that I wanted to try out and I think I'm in love!

A friend had a new baby girl last Friday and I decided that I wanted to do some baby girl cookies for her, but didn't have any baby specific cutters, so I went through what I had and looked at things others had done online and came up with these for her:

I had other things in mind for these, but within 10 minutes of starting to work on them, I had a migraine with aura hit me, so I didn't think I should try decorating cookies while I was blind for all intents and purposes, so I quickly knocked these out the next morning before work and turned the fan on them so that they'd be dry by the time I got home.  I just used the pink I was using on the cookies for Easter, although I really wanted to make a more pale pink, but with the aforementioned headache, I just didn't have any other option at that point if I were going to get these to her when I would see her on Wednesday afternoon.  I had also planned to do a couple of small lambs with pink accents, but in my haste of pulling them off the baking pan, I broke both of them.  Rather than putting them down my human garbage disposal, I just tossed them onto a paper plate.  The next morning, I was thrilled when I saw the break pattern and what I can use that same cutter for.  Take a look and see if you see it:

While making icing this go around, I realized I was out of almond extract, but just doubled the vanilla and kept working and never gave it another thought.  After giving my friend her new baby girl cookies, she sent me a text asking whether they contained any nut ingredients including things like almond extract because her 3 year old has severe nut allergies.  Fortunately this little guy was able to enjoy a cookie with his parents and older brother simply because I was out of almond extract.  My husband isn't a huge fan of the almond extract in the icing (and sugar cookies when I do them), so I may very well just no longer use it, unless specifically requested, as the idea of nut allergies never even occurred to me before.

Flower Power

So when I saw that LilaLoa was sponsoring a give-away challenge, I knew I wanted to enter - especially because the winner is chosen at random, so skill and expertise play no part in the selection of a winner and therefore a newbie like me might actually have a chance!  Also, I wanted to try something else that I'd not yet done.  How I didn't realize that there was a flower cutter among the ones my grandmother gave me recently, I don't know, but when I ran across it this week, I was so excited to find it.  

The challenge is to mix up your cookie pics - to do something different and not get stuck in a rut of how you photograph your cookies.  Granted, this is only the fourth post I've done, but I did find myself falling into the rut of arranging them on a plate and taking an overhead shot.  So, this morning's "photo shoot" (Work it, Cookie!) consisted of about a gazillion pics from a bazillion different angles.  As a background I used a piece of tissue paper left over from my mom's retirement party (the beginning of this cookie obsession) that a couple of my cookies made me think of (you'll see what I mean with that cookie camouflaged amid the polka dotted paper).  After viewing the pics, I found that I really liked the close-ups, which is surprising because overall, I wasn't thrilled with these cookies, but I'll get to that later, although maybe not today since my house really needs cleaning, but then again, that could be the perfect excuse to go ahead and detail my experience and what I learned during this 4th batch of cookies.  So here ya go, my pics for the challenge:

And here are some individual shots rather than just the collage version: