six feet underground, or 20,000 leagues under the sea... cookies!

Thank you to Jef for his order of Dia de los Muertos skulls and mermaids!
The mermaid shape is actually a Disney Pocahontas in a kind of heroine stance with her hair blowing, I just bent her a little so she'd have a dolphin-like swoop.  and of course the Ariel palette, but with Ginger Grant make-up, and some pearl bling.  (are we still saying "bling"?) stay tuned, I have Halloween/baby/barista cuteness on the way.

Baking Dead

cookie-superfan Wendy asked for cookies for her kiddo Mike who's turning 14 and is a fan of zombies.  who isn't?  i'm glued to The Walking Dead every week, then watch each episode on demand a few more times.  hubby even got me a t-shirt.  and after making dozens of undead hands reaching out of the grave, it was time for some full-corpse, brain-eating action.  i used the same dryer-icing dead flesh technique, drew the exposed skull with edible marker, and painted blood drool with watered down red gel food coloring.  they're cute in a way.  and gross.  :)
happy birthday Mike!  and thanks to Wendy for the challenge.  on the way, lil' birdies...

great pumpkins

boss Candice has a younger sister Sandra who requested pumpkin cookies for her kiddos’ Halloween parties at school.  i have about 14 different pumpkin shapes, but these 2 are my new favorites.

i’ve become unsatisfied with just flat orange pumpkins, and even flat orange with lines suggesting the vertical segments, so when i ice pumpkins i fill in every other segment, and when they’re dry, i go back and fill in the rest, and you get those nice wedges.  my other neat trick was adding black to my leftover orange to get brown for the stems, then adding the leftover brown to the green making a mossy hue for the leaves.  nothing wasted.  green edible ink markers finished off the details, and each got a little favor bag.  

 thank you Sandra, and happy Halloween to all!  coming next week, Michael’s 5th birthday, and not long after, i’m thinking about mustaches.  yeah.

*boneless recipe

happy Halloween early!  this week at the Meet Market, pick up some spooky skulls and chocolate chip cookies with your soup'n'sammiches.  and stay tuned for some fat lil' pumpkins.

boo!

how do these grab you?

Mary Jo's niece has graduated from Iowa and threw a "Thriller" themed graduation party, and Mary Jo wondered if i could make 8 dozen of something to match.  while i probably could have done full body zombies, 96 dead hands reaching out of the dirt seemed subtler, and certainly quicker.  a little extra powdered sugar made the death-green a little lumpier, lending to a gnarly sinewy claw-like shape, and table sugar over the grey icing made the tombstones extra stoney-textured.  thanks to Mary Jo, and 96 high-5's to the grad!  coming soon, i think flowers.... (pondering....)

Thriller... Thriller night...

so happy belated halloween! now that i have a new laptop, and it's actually from this decade, i can now pop in the camera's memory card and upload to the picture folder instantly.  but then i still have to get my butt to Starbucks to get to the internet, so please continue to bear with me.
these lovely minis were for an 80's themed Halloween party--lace, stars and plaid, all via the airbrush. Jeff and i went as Peg Bundy and The Greatest American Hero.   i had many plans for other H'ween cookies, but either you can have cookies, or i can have a functioning household, but not always the 2 together.  don't worry, i did some house keeping and i'm ready for Christmas.  and i'm still ready to do this in someone else's kitchen, so if you know a bakery...  anyway, i had started to make ninja clowns, but the many steps took time and my icing went flat, so they sat there half finished and Jeff ate the good ones.  i said, "can't you tell the difference between an ugly unfinished cookie and a nice picture-worthy finished one?"  he can't.  and i'd scan the sketches i drew, but then we're back to the "computer issues" conversation.  so back to cookies.  coming soon: some baby birdies, pairs of pears, something for Nessa 'cause she rocks and helps Jeff do stuff with his stock options, and a ninja clown revival for Ryan for helping me figure out that IE was my Facebook problem.  that's right kids, i pay back favors with cookie awesomeness.  now who wants to hang some lattice or tune my car?  bbl, and have a great weekend :)

los muertos!

my last post talked about my artistic origins. all that drawing i did as a kid looked nice on the refrigerator, and i made some really swell coffee mugs in ceramics class, but these little edible drawings are what people remember now. i get asked all the time, "how's the cookie business?" and it's frustrating to have to still be a hobbyist, not a business-ist, but people keep encouraging me, and i keep baking. and behind the scenes, i'm thinking a lot about the future too. i see myself aproned, flecked with stray luster dust, piping a billion dots on some bride-zilla's fairy-tale-wedding favors and humming happily to myself. i'm not necessarily famous in this scenario, but if the cookie world calls on me to be on TV, or be lauded in magazines i just may have to go along. and since i won't get there with boring cookies, i've been aspiring to new levels of awesomeness. i'd like to make cookies such that Martha Stewart would say "holy fondant, those are gorgeous." even if they're just cookies for a 6 year old's birthday, or Uncle Bob's retirement party. because really, if someone is special enough to get a cookie, the cookie should also be special, right?
now how do i segue into these Dia de los Muertos cookies? maybe since i'm talking about the future, i could point out that even if i'm rich and famous, there's still the great equalizer, death, which José Guadalupe Posada illustrated with "La Calavera Catrina" portraying a rich woman as a dressed-up skeleton, and inspiring Dia de los Muertos imagery for the last century. (yay, art history lesson!) i just have to say, if i die, and you feel some need to dig up my skull and have a "poor Yorick" moment, by all means, rinse it off and paint some flowers on it. (you knew her well, a woman of infinite jest...)
i googled a good skull image, resized it, glued it to a plastic yogurt lid, cut it out with an x-acto knife, and airbrushed over it onto a white-iced skull cookie. when dry, i drew with food writing markers. drawback: not enough colors in the pack of markers...
on the way, that one owl, a wine party, some horseback riding, and maybe some deer hunting. mmmm, woodsy...

shoot the moon

i was to color the object that began with a T (it was a tie) so i colored all over its general area with my blue crayon. i was 5, and my kindergarten teacher didn't like my coloring skills. i was taken aside and shown the proper way to stay in the lines and actually make the outline look like the object it represented. while "coloring outside the lines" became an individualist's badge of honor for my generation, it isn't a method that serves every artistic intent. Tolkien didn't write all over the walls, he put Lord of the Rings in a book. you don't toss apples and cinnamon in the oven and hope for the best, you follow the apple pie recipe.
after i was taught how to color in the lines, i loved drawing. i don't know how much paper and how many crayons i went through in my childhood. i got addicted to "making stuff" especially if that stuff made a space a little prettier, or a little more festive. other people spent Black Friday shopping, i spent it cutting out snowflakes to tape to the windows. by high school, i wanted to go into special effects make-up, or movie set designing. i wanted my "lines" to be a director's vision, and my "crayons" to be sculpting tools and paint. but i just couldn't get excited about moving to Hollywood, so i began to wonder if it was the story i was trying to express, rather than its illustrations. so i switched to a writing major.
i graduated from college the year that everyone started a blog and newspapers starting dropping like flies. nothing had happened to me yet, so i had nothing to write about. i took a desk job. i left art to my off time. after a few too many years, i wondered how some people got to be what they wanted, and poor saps like me had to "direct your call." by then i was nuts for cookies, but i had a portfolio to build.
so i built one. and i found that cookie decorating is just coloring in the lines, and making a moment a little more festive and pretty. it's expressing a vision, fooling the eye, telling a story, suspending disbelief, wowing an audience, and taking you back to age 5 for a little while.

in kindergarten i was a witch for Halloween, and i wanted to be an artist when i grew up...

which will the witch wear?

i did some more airbrush tests (which i can't show you because that picture's file is broken but whatever, they were tests, right?) and was pleased with how they turned out, so i put on my witch hat (no, i'm kidding) and got to work on some Halloween ideas. more magic is forthcoming; for now, i present: witch dresses!
these were a blast. (airbrush joke) i think every cookier has this dress cutter (Sur la Table) but i added the partial oval at the top to accommodate a hanger--i thought it gave it a little more context, after all a dress either has a person in it, or you hang it up, right?
i used to be annoyed at the inclusion of purple in the Halloween pallete. i think when it was a new trend, it seemed to be taking over orange's place. but lately, and with it's new friend poison green, Halloween's color scheme is kind of spooky-carnival-esque. like once upon a time these colors were painted brightly on Halloween decorations and eventually aged to a macabre patina, inspiring Tim Burton to revive them on the big screen. inspiring me to find a piece of lace to drape over the skirt portion of the cookie and spray with black. and i think they put the "boo" in "booya."
i used sanding sugar on the collar and cuffs, pearl dust on the hanger (silver on black icing) and waistband (bronze on orange) and silver dragees for buttons. this would be equally awesome as ivory on white wedding dresses with pearl dust. or bright colors, different necklines, different stencils... [*daydreaming*]
coming really soon, some Halloween cookies take flight! plus a football/sci-fi twin birthday, "los muertos!", and maybe some wine?
p.s., thanks for all the facebook and twitter love after the camels were posted! i felt kind of famous this week :)

in "dog years" he's dead

i remember it this way: John was about 11 and drew a line drawing of his room. i was 3 and didn't get it because i only saw outlines. cartoons were colored in; you could tell Tom from Jerry, Bugs from Daffy, but in his drawing, i couldn't tell window from bookshelf. then he colored in the lamp. suddenly i had a point of reference, some context for scale and the like, and the rest of the picture fell into place. it fell, it so happens, during dinner while i stared at it, hanging on the fridge. i was like that guy in Mallrats looking at the sailboat. suddenly someone asked me a question, probably about the dinner conversation topic, as though no conclusion was being reached and the 3-year-old might have some insight, and i pointed to the fridge and replied "i look at the light." laughter ensued, and it became a catchphrase in my family, meaning, loosely, "i'm no longer paying attention to you and would rather stare at the light fixture," a preschooler's proto-"talk-to-the-hand."

but i wasn't dismissing them, i was meaning to say "sorry, i wasn't paying a bit of attention, you see that scribble that John made this afternoon suddenly makes sense to me, and my golly, that's his funky yellow metal 70's desk lamp right there!" then i noticed the outlines in cartoons, always a thin black ink line like comic books. then i got into coloring books--more lines. then i noticed nothing around me had lines. then i just had to learn to draw.

and so here i am, still making outlines and coloring them in. and my big brother (whose first word was seriously "cookie") turned the big four-O today. and whether or not the baby boomers are right, and 50 is the new 40, i marked the milestone with a snarky little graveyard.

light gray was piped just after the darker gray was applied so the designs were flush, then coated in table sugar for a stony texture when dry. the roses are icing stems and leaves with fondant flowers.

here's a closer look, and truer to color, in different lighting. that's my pinky in the foreground, so you can see those roses were tiny. i'll have more about fondant on cookies tomorrow. look forward to shiny shoes, leafy moonlit trees, a mummy, ghosts in the graveyard, a pumpkin patch, and wormy apples. mmmmm.....

and coming soon, lil' Lucy lemondrop turns 1. till then happy birthday John, everyone check out his blog (see link on the right, "Conan's Fiero") and happy Halloween-'een everyone!

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.