katie + jeff

i married my sweety jeff, and to commemorate the event i made about 220 cookies! each favor bag had one of each cookie with an autumn faux sprig. the cookies had a layer of pearl dust (by wilton) and turned one sugar-cookie-skeptic into a believer.
click on the picture to see the full wedding cookie slide show.

happy halloween!!

here's one idea i had for cookies-as art. propping the darn things up was challenging, i think next time i'll resize them and lay them flat. raise your hand if you'd like to see more in a picture book :)













and here are eldra's 3 designs for october. more later, as i hafta run to a halloween party (you betcha i'm bringing cookies!) but i just loooved making the little bones and corn kernels. piping is awesome.

eldra's "year of cookies" august '09

challenging myself to do new and different shapes for eldra this month was easy when you remember that nothing happens in august. no holidays, no particular weather accept hot. so i decided to use that lazy-days-of-summer idea and give eldra a day at the lake.

neat new techniques included using the sunflower to make the sun, and painting the woodgrain on the boat with brown food coloring. i was totally intimidated by the fish, but it became my favorite of the trio.

tune in next month; it's back-to-school season, with a storybook theme.

the peaceful cookie

natalia's 9th birthday was this summer and her mom said she digs peace signs and bright colors. turns out i can do both!

it might have been the humidity, but the frosting got uncooperative, so i switched from an outline to dots, and i think it made it even more festive. see, things turn out well when you give peace a chance. for more colors, check out the slide show.

peace!

i scream, you scream...

heather had the grown-ups over for andrew and grace's summer birthdays, so i made a shape for kids of all ages. who doesn't love an ice cream cone :)

"my little phonies"

i know i said i didn't want to make (or fake!) licensed characters but these weren't for sale, so i'm sure i won't be receiving a cease and desist letter from the my little pony people. :)

these were for my future niece and flower girl's 3rd birthday. (see the slideshow for the lavender version.) and yes i really did draw the whole thing out and color it. i think i spent about 6 hours between planning, rolling, baking and decorating, and the party-goers finished them off in a half hour. (as it should be, they were darn tastey too.)

looking forward to a farm scene one day, these would be just as nice in regular horse colors. i'll have to redraw them to make the feet and face less toy-like. perhaps i'll add a verticle piece and make carousel horses?

farmer's market!

this platter was SO much fun to make! the banana was the moon cookie cutter, the shape pinched at each end; the turnip was a heart and a palm tree spliced together; the lemon was a football shape; the radish was a mini heart and mini oak leaf; the cherries were made from a heart; the chili pepper from a leaf; the grapes from circles and a maple leaf; the orange was a plain circle; the watermelon was a half circle; the cauliflower and lettuce were a metal shape i didnt like and bent into an amorphus round shape; the peach was an apple with an altered bottom; the peas in a pod were circles and the moon again; and the rasberries were mini tombstones. i even gave the new shapes little leaves with a fondant cutter. i made them just for the fun of it, and i gave them to my mom when we visited for her birthday. now i'm all inspired to look at shapes beyond their original intended shape, or to combine shapes to make a new picture. i love looking at cookies as little pictures to color. (i was a coloring book artiste back in the day--i wore my crayons down to nubs.) when i think of the composition of the picture as a coloring book, with fields of color lying next to each other, designing cookies gets a whole lot easier. and a whole lot bigger. i would cut one shape and think of another. ...i think i like the blackberries the best.

'cause that's how i roll...

i've been doing stars since i was very little. they're the easiest. icing, sugar, done. to do hundreds of them is, really, to learn about color mixing and having a steady hand. when i do stars, they're uniform, bright, simple and lovely, just like if i've been doing them for 30 years. many of the designs you're seeing now are first attempts. while the sea horse to your left is pretty darn cute, be assured that my next batch of sea horses will be an upgrade. same with all my designs. i'll try to post my latest and best work for each shape.
some other noteables--if you need party favors, i can individually [cellophane] bag the cookies and tie with ribbon. otherwise if i'm delivering them, they'll be on a plastic plate which you can keep, with the whole plate-and-cookie-pile wrapped in cellophane, gathered at the top, and tied with ribbon. if i'm invited to the party, i'll put them on a glass plate, but i'll take the plate home. :)
i have no interest in doing "cookie pops" or bouquets.
lastly, i can't do licensed characters for 3 reasons. 1, i dont have licensed-character cookie cutters. 2, if i did, or if i could fake the designs, i'd technically be making money with someone else's intellectual property. 3, i consider someone else's characters to be someone else's art. to make a tinkerbell cookie is, for me, to just be the last step in disney's cookie business. i enjoy making my own pictures. an exception to this is if the character is ubiquitous/ generic/ public domain. everybody can recognize dracula, the froggy prince, santa, little bo peep, etc, without it being specific to a copyrighted image. so if you're having a sesame street party, i can't give you big bird, but i can do a rainbow of ABC's; hanna montana can have pink stars; batman can have a flock of multi-sized bats--you get the idea. there's a cookie for every party.

eldra's "year of cookies" july '09

and here's eldra's cookies for july. at first i was going simple again--a star, a baseball, and as i was wading through my cutters i thought no, too boring. so i went with the very-appropriate flag, the baffling eagle (i had to consult an eagle calendar for his face) and a more complicated star. thumbs up to mom for getting me silver and gold sugar. i'm not sure if i'd go actual metalic with cookies, but the colors, paired with metalic dragees, were simple and effective. now if only i had a fine enough point to make all 50 stars and 13 stripes.

note to the patriotic, i do have a large statue of liberty cutter. and lots of green sugar. :)

cookies that speak for themselves

i remember my niece taylor helping with cookies at 3. she'd pick the shape (christmas tree) then the color icing (yellow). we'd get her set up with the icing because that butter knife is tricky, then she'd put on her own decorations (11 hot red cinnamon candies). her daddy loved them.

i made 10s for taylor's 10th birthday this summer. dark and light pink, and white with heavily and lightly sprinkled rainbow sugar. strangly enough, all the dark pink cookies went first. i guess they looked the tastiest.

cool thing about cookie text is the letters or digits sticking together. i could make any age, name, even a sign if i could keep it intact. i did X's and O's for valentine's day once. i could do people names, company names, a group of words like bang, zoom, pow in super hero colors. someone could order "(name) will you marry me?" in cookies. awwww...

eldra's "year of cookies," june '09

Trinity Lutheran Elementary School (West Chicago) held a bowling and silent auction fundraiser in mid-May. i agreed to add "a year of cookies" to the auction: 1 dozen cookies, 3 shapes per dozen, every month for a year. that's 144 cookies! [i shyed at naming a value--what makes a cookie a $12 cookie anyway? but someone out there charges it. i gave a low "retail price," considering most sites like these charge around $3. that's quite a bit for what, i think, are usually pretty ordinary.] and the winner of the auction? eldra!

the theme for june was 'june bugs.' the strawberry is such a happy little shape, i had to use it. but i wanted to challenge myself, not make my easy favorites, so i added painted bugs. an interesting thing, painting food. i wonder what else i can paint...

cars, andrew's 5th birthday, june '09

andrew is still a fan of trains, but if it has an engine, it still gets a thumbs up. since i did trains for birthday #4, i decided on cars for #5. i was very intimidated by this cookie cutter. i'll have to scan the sketch i made just to understand what i was doing--i labeled all the fields of color and decided, based on the ability to mix the previous color with the next color, what order i would mix the colors of icing, and in what order i would fill the sections of cookie. notice that the smooth black tire required drying time to repel the blue sugar of the 'paintjob.' that takes planning my friend! :)

"test tiles"

sprinkle orange sugar on pink icing, and you get a peachy color. sprinkle it on red, and its like fall leaves. sprinkle green on green and it's emeraldy, but sprinkle yellow on green and it hints at an obnoxious chartreuse. i used graham crackers to test my colors. favorite results include teal, lavendar, and sky blue.

who doesn't like rainbow dots?

the color experiment started with the bright idea to decorate graham crackers like little paintings. i could do greeting cards! the last supper! alas, the nature of graham crackers is absorbant and crumbly, and can't stand up to a layer of icing, unless it's purely for decoration. the rainbow in the slideshow was the sole survivor of the evening. the rest were soft, the colors bled... i'll stick with my sugar cookies, but for practice, poping open a box of crackers beats mixing, rolling, cutting and baking another batch.

any freestyle images you'd like to see on a cookie? i'm on the hunt for a large square or rectangle as a canvas.

on learning

"where'd you learn how to do that?"
i've been decorating christmas cookies with my mom since i was 4. the standard technique was always to push the frosting to the edge with a butter knife, strategically shake the sprinkles, add details with gel. plates of cookies--chocolate chip, pecan fingers, even one made with potato chips, were assembled for gifts and each was topped with a selection of decorated sugar cookies. rudolph, santa, frosty, wreaths, bells, stars, trees, then later candy canes, and some trial shapes that didnt stick around like the little house, the gift box, santa's boot, all magically appeared in royal icing, all done in our "sloppiest best."
we have our own styles. mom likes making rudolph with solid pastel icing, a splash of nonpariels, and a cinnamon red-hot nose. they're like pop-art. i like making the reindeer white with a harness of dragee jingle bells.
we always had the problem of our icing only reaching a certain level of color. food coloring in drop form will never achieve red, for instance, only a deep pink. the pastel frosting only served as a background to a layer of sugar in the saturated color--red on pink, forest green on minty green. wilton food coloring solved it. a layer of red icing, followed by a layer of red sugar makes a seriously red cookie.
the tubes of decorating gel were my favorite thing when i was 4. i'd paint a whole cookie with it. when it dries though, it's like those gummy blobs that hold index card ads and order forms to the inside of magazines. you'd remove the plastic wrap from the plate of cookies and it would rip frosty's black coal eyes and orange carrot nose right out of his hardened white frosted face. the evolving cookie artist in me needed to make details, but was limited with the standard butter knife. i switched to piping. eventually i could be found with 3 or 4 cookies in front of me in various stages of drying, so a new wet line of piping wouldnt sink into it's background color.
3 or 4 cookies turned into several dozen once i was commissioned to decorate in bulk. then i had to coordinate which layer to do when so that one color icing wouldnt mix with its neighbor, or so i could have a sugar-coated field up against a smooth one without the sugar wandering and sticking. on top of that, i had to decide how to mix my colors so i wasnt wasting frosting. red and yellow, once done, can be added to the orange. do the orange first, and you have leftover red and yellow. even more complicated is trying to do this in august with no air conditioning. been there, it was messy. the air is fixed, but it's still a ballet of temperature, drying time, and gravity.
probably the hardest is figuring out where those lines go. unless its the plastic stamp kind, the cutter only gives you the outline. you have to decide where the eyes go, how many toes the bird has, how the daisy's petals should join to the center. my art teachers would be pleased; i now make sketches. i trace the cutter, outline it to allow for the cookie shape puffing up, then i draw in the parts and plan the successive color making. with cookie in hand i switch from pencil to icing, and the magic begins. or more correctly, it continues.

i am an elf

"kinds of people in the world? Those who want to own the toys, and those who long to make them." ~ allan gurganus, plays well with others

i smiled when i read that.

but this little elf has to find the usb cable for the camera or you'll never see anything new. stop back in soon!

~k