Merry Cookie Christmas!

Posted in Celebration, Cookies, Holiday, Sweet, Themed by shimmrblu

This year was my second Cookie Exchange Extravaganza, and I made sugar cookie Christmas sweaters and mittens 🙂

MerryCookieChristmas_02

For the sweaters I used Sweet Sugar Belle’s royal icing recipe again and separated the icing into red, green and white. As the planning continued, my strategy got simpler and simpler… Maybe another time I can make all of them customized and silly with santas, snowmen, reindeer, presents, lights, sleighs, chimneys etc.

Since the royal icing takes a number of hours to set, I baked and created the background icing layers one day, and piped the detail in white another…

Voila!! So many….

I packaged what I had up into baggies of 6 each…

And off to the exchange I went! Look at the piles of amaaazing cookies that everyone brought!

For my NEXT three dozen (remember–strategy got simpler and simpler… eight dozen sweater cookies, ok six dozen sweater cookies, ok only two base colors and white decoration, ok actually three dozen sweater cookies and three other dozen of something else…that will be faster to bake and decorate)….. I made mitten cookies dipped in semi-sweet chocolate and garnished with little cookie stars and snowflake sprinkles! There were a few I tried edible glitter, but the glitter got away from me… :/

Just dipped!

27Nov2014

Thanksgiving 2014

Posted in Celebration, Holiday, PIe, Sweet by shimmrblu

So for Thanksgiving this year I tried baking a sweet potato pie, enhanced with bourbon and a brown sugar layer between the crust and the filling… Honestly, I was disappointed–especially with the crust. The recipe was much more involved than I ever do for crust, and did not come out well for all the effort! Needless to say, the filling was pretty good…

17Mar2014

Feeling Lucky

Posted in Cookies, Holiday, Sweet by shimmrblu

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I had fun trying out a new cookie decorating technique…

I made some mistakes and have a list of improvements to make, but I also have a list of ideas for future decorations swirling around in my head and am eager to practice more!

I happened upon SugarBelle’s blog and used her royal icing recipe for these cookies (Note: After finishing my cookie experiment, I saw a much more recent post from SugarBelle with an updated royal icing recipe and tips here!).

Here are the ingredients ready to begin my royal icing adventure…

The recipe called for mixing up VERY stiff icing to start from for tinting and watering down to desired consistencies for decorating. I think I was pretty successful in this (and my wrist felt it too after mixing in all of the coloring!)

The only two green tint colors I had were these two…

Let the tinting begin! After multiple rounds of adding a couple drops at a time and stirring…

Even if not quite the two green colors I had imagined, I eventually got a decent contrast and figured that was the best I could do with what I had… time to expand my green tint collection!

(I apologize for lack of photos during this process…) I then watered down my ‘pipe consistency’ icing with a spray water bottle, placed it in a piping bag with a #3 tip, and prepared my ‘flood consistency’ icing by watering it down even more, and placed it in a squeeze bottle. Starting simple, below you can see one cookie that has been outlined, and the other that has been outlined and then “flooded’.