Here comes Peter Cotton Tail! Happy Easter Cookies

Happy Spring, Happy Easter! Here are the Easter cookies I've been working on. I just wish the weather would be a bit more Spring like here in Kansas City! Spring colors make you want to get outdoors!


My larger butterfly turned out a little lopsided. Not sure what happened to the shape when I baked it! Opps!
I thought the chicks coming out of their egg shells was a cute idea. I found them on Esty.com. They were fun and easy to make. I've had a bit of trouble with my icing lately so had to improvise and fix them a bit - but to the untrained "cookie" eye, you would never know! The funny thing about baking and decorating - each batch is entirely different and I always just hope they turn out for the best. Your icing or decorations can easily go hay wire!
Tried to get a bit creative with the flowers here. I like the colors but not really sure I like the decorating as much.
Some new basket cookie cutters that I thought were really fun and different. They took a bit of time but I"m really pleased with how they turned out.

We can't forget bunnies of all shapes and sizes for Easter!



Have a great day! Happy Baking. I've already been up a few hours working on my next batch of cookies!

A Bit of Spring

I have Spring Fever!!! I wish the weather would cooperate though! I heard we are supposed to get snow in KS again soon. ARGG....But these ladybugs and frogs sure make you wish for Spring to come a little sooner and stay! They are for a child's birthday party. I hope she likes them!

Cooking with Trevor

So this blog is about my baking adventures, right? This is one that Trevor and I had this weekend!!! I thought I would share because we had a lot of fun.

Trevor wanted to cook something with me - mainly so he could do his favorite part - break the egg. I found a recipe online that makes only 2 cupcakes!!! PERFECT. A new blog that I found called How Sweet It Is. Her recipe is here. So as it was raining outside we got to work making our treats for the afternoon. Trevor helped me with it all - the breaking of the egg, measuring, mixing and decorating.


Our course waiting for our masterpiece to be done is always a bit challenging and we have to check and see how it's doing in the oven.


These are the finished products! Not bad and that's all we wanted to eat this afternoon anyway!

So let's get to decorating. I hadn't thrown out the icing I had been using this week so I had several colors already made up for Trevor to choose from. Of course it was very important to test each color to see how they tasted first.
And Mom's icing always turns Trevor's face a different color! The price we pay for good icing.


Trevor has never decorated his own treats. Boy did he have fun squeezing the icing bags just like Mom and putting on all the sprinkles himself.

Ta-Da! Our work is done. By the time he was done there was icing all over his pants, face, hands, countertops. What a mess but it was well worth it. He had a blast doing it.

They are very pretty, don't you think? I had a few other colors but Trevor just wanted to eat those and not decorate with them.

The cupcakes were quite YUMMY!!!

This was something fun to do in the afternoon that didn't take very long. I'm sure we will try it again sometime!

Happy Baking!

Ahoy Mates

These pirates are on a long journey right now to NEW YORK CITY!!!! I'm praying they make it there all right. I get very nervous when mailing cookies....my cousin is having a pirate themed birthday party for one of her sons.....I had a lot of fun with these and did a few different ones that I hadn't before!

HAPPY ST. PAT'S DAY

HAPPY ST. PAT'S DAY!

No cookies to share but just wanted to say have a great day! May the luck of the Irish be with you all year long. I know we could certainly use some. Oh and a pot of gold or two would be nice.

I'm on to my next set of cookies but ready to give out the ones I made for the holiday. Those of you that know me - you know I don't give my cookies to just anyone....you have to be on the "special" list! I decided to share with the two men in my life today! But to be able to eat one, they had to pose for pictures!




Trevor will willingly pose for one of Mom's cookies!


May your blessings outnumber
The shamrocks that grow,
And may trouble avoid you
Wherever you go.
~Irish Blessing


Have a great day!

Lots of Leprechauns

Cookie cutters come and in many shapes and sizes...but sometimes it's fun to think outside the box. I have to give all my credit here to The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle. Another fabulous idea. See these cute little leprechauns? Well, they are not made out of leprechaun cookie cutters...they are made out of a wreath, snowman, circle, ice cream cone, skull, Frankenstein. Isn't that so clever???? They were lots of fun to make and pretty easy!

So here are the secrets....this leprechaun is made out of Frankenstein's head (upside down)

A Christmas wreath. (upside down)

Upside down ice cream cone.

Upside down skull.

This one is pretty simple....a circle.

A big snowman with the top cut off.

I never would have thought to use any of these cookie cutters!! Luckily there are creative people out there for me to borrow all my ideas from. As you can see this is a theme of mine. Someday I do need to come up with a few of my own clever ones! But for now "borrowed ones" will have to do.

That's it for my St. Pat's day cookies this year. On to different things. I'm going to be working on some fun pirate themed cookies this week for my neat cousin. I have some great ideas to use and can't wait to see how they turn out!

A Bit of Gold along with some Spring-pillars

I look at some many cool cookie blogs each week - get their updates automatcallly just like you might get mine. I never read many blogs before I started baking cookies and it's so fun to see what the real "experts" are up to and try to copy/borrow ideas from them!

I was once again inspired by some favorite blogs of mine to branch out and try new things! I wish I had such great ideas like so many people come up with!

I also tried a new chocolate cookie recipe so we'll see what the testers think how they turned out this week. I wanted more of a chocolate taste unlike last time. I like strong flavors and not just a hint.

I need to thank Cookie Crazie for this idea below. She calls them her Spring-pillars. When I saw them I thought they were so cute and just had to try them. They were really fun to make. I just cut out several circles and "smooshed" them together. For the head with antennas I actually used a bunny head and reshaped the ears. I thought they turned out pretty good!


Here was another out of the box idea I saw this week and I jumped on trying it because it looked so fun! This cookie was made with 3 different cookie cutters put together. A big circle, a small circle and a small flower. Cut them all out and "smooshed" them together to get the rainbow and pot of gold below. Pretty cool, huh?




Here's the finished product! This was inspired by The Sweet Adventures of SugarBelle. Everyone can use a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?



I really liked the gold sprinkles I found that look like gold. Think I found the right touch for these!

Just a few more to finish up for St. Pat's Day! I'm hoping to find my pot of gold some day!

Happy Birthday Brady! Hope you get some tee times!

Another set of cookies are on their way across the USA! Happy Birthday to my brother Brady who lives in Dallas!!!


An avid golfer I thought he needed some golf themed cookies! I'm hoping for a hole in one if he makes it to the golf course!


Happy Birthday, Brady! (a few days early)

HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Not only is it Happy St. Patrick's Day but it's.....HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!!
It was one year ago that I started making and decorating sugar cookies!!! St. Pat's Day cookies were my very first venture!!! My oh my - many cookies since then - I believe about 1800! Many hours spent, lots of hard work, lots of research, a whole new vocabulary for baking (ever hear the words coupler, pipe or flood and know what they mean in relation to cookies???) some frustration, lots learned --- what a great thing I found only one year ago. For the past year I've averaged at least making one cookie batch per week. You don't even want to know how many cookie cutters I have....I have had to find new places to stash things with all my baking! My dream is to have a bigger kitchen for all my baking. A real store would be wonderful - but that is a pipe dream!

I got started last year when my Mom gave me a cupcake book. I thought what am I going to do with this??? I can't even bake! I went into the speciality shop that it came from and started looking around. Wow - overwhelming to say the least. Cupcakes looked pretty hard and I ended up starting out with cookies. I reconnected with a grade school friend who is the BEST cookie maker and baker I have ever met. She has helped me with my progress - I've used her recipes, her advice, her templates...I wish someday I could be half as good as Amalia. I have to thank my dear friend Amalia Standard for all that she has done for me the past year! She is an amazing woman all the way around. I also subscribe to lots of blogs that send me updates on their cookie ventures, advice, etc. Those have been my inspiration as well.

Now I have to take a minute to compare.....here is where I was last year with my first attempt. Okay, not all that bad you say.....

But looking below, I can at least tell the difference on how far I've come!!! Much more professional in my opinion, although I still have a long way to go and lots more practice before I would feel that I"m really good at this!
To quote one of my favorite Blogs - The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle

Being a good cookier is not about how perfectly you decorate a cookie, its about how well you can fix it when you screw up, and believe me, you WILL screw up!

Below I'm looking at my finished product from one year ago....Oh my. I can't say I'm all that great now but wow I have come a long way. I suppose practice does really make better, right? And at the time these were good for me and just starting out!

These below are a few of the St. Pat's Day cookies I've done this week. A few new cutters for the holiday....


I didn't really think making a horseshoe for goodluck with black or grey would be very festive. So I decided to try a rainbow. I had no idea how hard this would be until I started. Doing a single line of each color took a very steady hand - and that I don't have yet! Far away they look okay, but you can definitely see the imperfections up close.

And for the rainbow we always need a pot of gold, right? Just a few shamrocks for the occasion. These aren't my favorite cookies I've ever done but they can't all be, right?

I have a few more St. Pat's cookies up my sleeve that I will post later. I found some really neat things on some blogs and they were fun to make! I will share those with you soon.