A friend of mine reached out to me in a panic and needed help decorating cupcakes for her son’s first birthday party in a jiffy! I brought some emergency sprinkles, supplies and a couple ideas, and Grandma, Mom and I decorated these babies (cupcakes, not the birthday boy) in a flash just before guests arrived!
Happy 1st birthday, Little George!
This year I tried my own hand at making the German Springerlie cookies I remember my Mom making each Christmas time. They involve a wooden rolling pin with little molded patterns, fresh anise seeds, allowing the cookies to dry out overnight before baking, and then leaving them in an air tight tin for a few weeks to soften and soak up the anise flavor!
Ready to roll…
Ready to cut…
Ready to dry overnight…
Baked and ready to be stored! We’ll see how they turn out in a few weeks 😉
Thanks, Mom!
This pumpkin cream cheese roll cake was delightfully easy to make, and pretty tasty too! Why do pumpkin and cream cheese go so well together?! Who cares! ;D
I am so happy to be posting after such a long, unintentional break! So grateful for 3-day weekends 😀 Happy Labor Day!
Picked up these beauties from a local farmer’s market this afternoon…
The crust definitely did not turn out to be the prettiest… but the pie was delicious.
I’m a little late posting, but Happy Independence Day!
Here are some late night snapshots of the blueberry-blackberry pie my Mom, brother and I made together and that I got to decorate the top of 🙂
I can’t wait to use these fun cookie cutters soon – keep an eye out for them! 😉
A simple red velvet cake to say thank you. This was my first attempt at covering a cake in fondant, and well, I got it covered! 🙂 I used a beautiful patterned embossing rolling pin, but realized fondant takes so much smoothing once on the cake, most of the pattern disappeared…. you can still see some subtle hints of the damask pattern. I’ll try it again with a pie crust.
This red velvet layer cake recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction blog is delicious and moist!  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s dry cake!
my fondant is stretched too thin…. but you can see some of the damask pattern on the sides 🙂
And with leftover batter… a patriotic cupcake with a little man saluting (kind of) and thanking those who gave their lives while serving. Thank you.
These egg cookies look nothing like the Ukranian eggs my Grandma was so good at decorating (similar to these), but I definitely thought of her and her immensely talented detail work while baking this batch. There is nothing waxy about these royal icing decorated sugar cookies – only a sugary, buttery, slightly soft crunch. 🙂
Candid: Staging in process…
Easter pineapple, anyone? 😉
Kiss 2014 goodbye. Watch 2015 blossom.  😉
All the best to you in 2015!
This year was my second Cookie Exchange Extravaganza, and I made sugar cookie Christmas sweaters and mittens 🙂
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!
