on following

now that my kiddo is going to bed at a normal time, i might have more than 20 minute spurts to actually read up on what other bakers and sugar artists are doing. so far i either post to this blog, check the message boards on Cookiers R Us, blab about a few things on facebook, maybe tweet, then i hear something falling over upstairs and computer time is over.
but with a little more downtime, it's high time i got my blogs and peeps and tweets and lists and likes all together. so i'm on a follow-back-quest. problem is, not all of my followers have their own blog listed under their links. sometimes they follow themselves and it's under blogs they've joined. while i'm doing my best, please don't hesitate to comment with a link to what you're doing. and suggest a few more icing-related sites while you're there. :)
otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for dinosaurs, army men, ice cream, horses...

summer school

next month i'll be taking the course to get my Illinois food service sanitation certification. i'll be legally permitted to participate in a baking job. a possible sticking point might be that my exposure to large mixers, ovens, scales, sacks of powder, and dough-rollers were all in ceramics studios, but it was 10 semesters of ceramics, from high school to post-college. upon my graduation from high school, i was planning to make alien foreheads for Star Trek-- i mentioned a few months ago, once i got to know fondant, i found it's really just another modeling clay. honestly, all i learned in sculpture and pottery taught me enough to make a passable wedding cake. except a crumb coat. still working on those.

but i'm not the only one getting smarter--Brenda's 5 daughters concluded another school year and their many teachers all got some cookies for a year well-taught. they are:

chicks--the only chick cookie cutter i had was the single bird, so i flipped him over, cut a space in the foreground, and added a buddy.








shoes and purses-- these are ok, but i'm still in the prototype-area for how i like to make sexy girly accessory cookies. but i'm a little weak on sexy-girly lately. i only started carrying a purse again, and my husband still calls it a diaper bag. and my favorite shoes are some ancient Birkenstocks. ...no one ever orders old sandal cookies. mine would be awesome...

"something with the Wizard of Oz" the house was a bit dark, and needed some white windy swirls to show that it was moving 'over the rainbow' not parked there, or falling on the Emerald City below. i'd happily do this scene again, but i'd make some adjustments. a good first run.



lambs and shepherd's hooks--the chicks shoes and rainbows were for 3 individuals. the rest were for groups, and these were for the Sunday school teachers. same sugared-icing-dot technique as the Easter sheep and clouds, and i even found a great photo of a lamb and copied it's eye shape.

these were for music teachers. now that i have food-writing pens, i can do sheet music.











and when i got to the last of my icing, i made some strange shades of purples and browns and greens and iced some moons and stars with earth tones, then dusted them with different colors of pearl dust.

this was a challenging order. believe it or not, it's actually kind of easier to do 200 of one kind, than 30, 6 different ways. with the former, it's assembly line. repetition. you get in a zen kind of groove. with many kinds, you have to plan what gets iced what color and when. you have to spread your work out even farther so you don't get green sugar on the pink cookies. you count a lot. but i know that in this dream job of mine, there will be scary orders. i'll have some mother-in-law micromanaging a baby shower, i'll have a bridezilla or two. but that's why i do these friends-and-family orders. i like the challenge. i keep at it so it starts becoming automatic--like how i'm getting to where i can measure out the amount of icing i need just by eyeballing it. i'm looking at these home projects like a kind of self-imposed one-person internship. and like how Columbia taught fiction writing by making you write a little more "out there" than most American audiences would require (making "just right" a piece of cake), i look at all the weird wonderful kinds of complicated effects i can find or invent, even if it's totally unlikely that i'll make any money off of a cookie that takes 23 steps to decorate. (but i'll know how!)

thanks Brenda, for your educational order! coming soon, Taylor's final 'tween' birthday, Grace and Andrew's summer co-birthday, and what to bake for Dad's birthday--a stumper...

fired up!

i've mentioned my extensive cookie cutter collection. i lost count after 400. i have something for every holiday, nearly every animal, even some that are anatomically correct. and i have a pot leaf. hubby thought a few leaves for a friend would be a funny gift. i was already up to my elbows in cookie dough for another order, so i cut out a few. then i noticed something cool.

here are the leaves, open and pot-like:

i could have been more authentic about it, but like i said, i was busy... but when you turn them upside down, and bring in the leaves a little, then ice them in black and put cascading dots...

you get fireworks!

*warning* never set your cookies on fire.

and no, these are not "enhanced" with "special ingredients" they were just to be fun. discovering an extra use for the cutter was a bonus. maybe also flames? or a splash? far out, man...

still on the way, Brenda's big 6...

some birthday baubles

Brittany, my niece, has followed her job in jewelry retail management all the way to Atlanta, all at the ripe old age (if i'm doing the math right, you know us old people) of 21. (at 21, i was in retail, but one of those know-nothing part-timers.) for her May birthday i thought it was fitting to give her some bling.
her mom, s-i-l Libby, got me the engagement ring cookie cutter from Sur la Table last Christmas, hoping i didn't already have it--i didn't, and here was a perfect reason to use it.
the hardest part was considering how best to make the sapphire look like a cut stone. i spent a good 10 minutes sketching and erasing before i just googled it. then to translate it to cookies, i iced the stone in blue, then painted it with a vodka/blue pearl dust/blue food coloring mixture. when dry, i painted the lines with vodka/white pearl dust. [water will start to dissolve the sugary surface; vodka is alcohol and will evaporate.] the silver was dark gray icing brushed with white pearl dust.
and i picked a blue frosty stone for 3 reasons: it was Will and Kate's wedding weekend (recall Kate's engagement ring); Brittany gave me a sapphire pendant one Christmas; and Brit is one of the few gals i know that can pull off wearing frosty blue eye make-up. i've tried, but frosty blue just looks better on my cookies than on me. :)
the hardest part after decorating them was sending them to Atlanta via UPS. not because of any actual problem, but if i were Mrs. Corporate-Cookie i'd have my own refrigerated trucks; with delivery services, you just have to hope. i was standing there reading all the things you're not allowed to ship like corrosives, explosives, etc, and under "other" was dry ice. which would have helped. it was like 90 degrees in IL that day. i asked, "can they park the truck in the shade?"
i emailed Brit and said if the southern heat melts them, i'll replace them, but they arrived intact. [whew!] happy birthday Brittany, and congrats on the career! i'd tell her to stay cool, but she's got that covered...
coming soon, Brenda gives cookie thanks to 30 teachers, 6 different ways.

everything's explodin'!

first, go here: www.cookiedecorator.com and look around, especially at the gallery. i'll wait...
back? good. i'm so thrilled that i finally learned where all the cookie people are. thanks Lesley! (check out her cookies at www.facebook.com/frostedbylesley ) people are joining daily: people with blogs younger than mine; with cake and cupcake experience, but new to cookies; people whose work i've seen in books; people who work for suppliers and cake shows. it's like we're all showing up at once, realizing that interest is spreading and darnit, cookies could be the next Big Thing if we knew how to get people together and make something happen.
in the chat forums we're talking about meet-ups and conventions, maybe even a charitable event (i plugged for www.cookiesforkidscancer.org, www.dropinanddecorate.org, and www.frostingforthecause.com) one thing is certain, we all seem to have an urge to gather, not just to compare finished products, or swap business cards, but to decorate cookies. that's awesome to me. that's like people who like to paint, all wanting to gather and paint together. like an art class, or a writers' workshop-- two things i used to do all the time in school, and now i don't do at all.
so i've been thinking about this career vacuum i've been in since graduating college, and how long is too long to be deciding what you want to be when you grow up, and then i remember that my favorite musician, Wayne Coyne, worked at Long John Silvers for like, 11 years before becoming a superstar. it paid his young-aspiring-rockstar bills, took up little brain space so his creativity still flourished, and now he and his freakishly talented band, The Flaming Lips, are so popular i can no longer afford their tickets. i keep this in mind when i look back on 10 long years of desks and fax machines and spreadsheets. sometimes it takes 11 years. sometimes you don't know what kind of artist you want to be, then you find yourself baking. (shrug)
in addition to spectacular music, Wayne also paints, often with streaking branching drips that kind of explode angularly like liquid blasted with air. i puddled some watered-down food coloring on a white Easter egg cookie and gave it a few blasts with an empty airbrush and got little Coynian-drip-explosions. here's a close-up; like a Rorschach ink blot, you can kind of stare at it (his work too) and see something new. go for it. pop in "virgo self-esteem broadcast," check out Wayne's mad skills here www.flaminglips.com/store/lithographs and ponder your last ten years...



"this is the beginning..."

Wayne's planes

F-I-L Wayne has a birthday mid-April, but whether it's his day or not, if the weather is nice, Wayne can probably be found in the back yard, pushing a grandkid on the swing. while torpedoing through the air, the kids like to look up and squint and point out planes, and birds, and whatever zooms into view.
i have an airplane cookie cutter with a top/bottom perspective that really only lets me decorate the plane to look like the boring underside of the craft, skew it all funny for a side view, or use the outline to suggest an element of the design-- in this case, "looking up." so i made plane-shaped sections of sky with birds and branches and telephone poles and little airplanes, all in silhouette, like when you squint at a blue sky.
the silhouettes were painted on with black food coloring; the brush can only make so fine a line though--i'm considering switching to a food-writing pen. the clouds were layers of white and gray icing dots and white sugar. off in the corner there's a piped icing jet contrail, or as Andrew says, "look! a skywriter!"
happy birthday Grandpa Wayne!
coming soon, silver and sapphire, purses and shoes, music, baby chicks, lambs, moons and stars, maybe dinosaurs, definitely army men, contraband and pyrotechnics, 'my little phonies,' and a few cookies go over the rainbow. (whew!)