...and more leaves...

so this is probably the first time i posted pictures on facebook, then waited a few hours to write about them here.  gotta get the word out!  on sale now at The Meet Market, cute little trees, and matching brownie pops.  and my spidey sense says there will be chocolate chip cookies later this week.  so come on in for lunch!
and later this month, definitely pumpkins, and i'm thinking some skulls too.

beautiful day In The Neighborhood

and here it is.  a quick little project stuck into a week busy with catering, made in less space than my hobbit kitchen because there's a whole restaurant happening around me.  i'm tickled pink.  after much searching, i've found a little place that's only 12 minutes away (or an hour if i take the bike path on a warm day), that was looking for a baker of interesting treats. 
In The Neighborhood "Meet Market" is a darling little place in E. Dundee, IL serving deli sandwiches, homemade soups and salads, and cookies (and more things to come) from yours truly.  it's the sister location to the deli in Elgin, and the cafe at the library.  beyond the restaurant, In The Neighborhood caters (with more than sandwiches), and twice a year they organize a community dinner in Elgin.  all the sandwiches are named after local landmarks, and served on vintage mismatched dinnerware that'll remind you of your mom's kitchen back in the 70s and 80s.  the music spans from "rock around the clock" to "don't stop believin'."  the floor is reclaimed wood.  my bosses wear jeans and t-shirts.  and for as relaxed as i feel working here [seriously, parked at a desk doing spreadsheets would have killed me, eventually] i feel compelled to throw my refreshed work-ethic headfirst into making this place a hit.  so throw a party and call them, huh?  put me to work!
the cookies, by the way, were iced with yellow, then airbrushed with red while the icing was still wet, doing that nice mottled look again.  then some gold dust and edible ink leaves.  now they're hanging out with chocolate chip bars and potato chip cookies.  mmmmm.....

turning leaves

my coworker at The Meet Market brought in some cookies from another establishment.  they were swirly fall leaves with the veins drawn in.  (they looked all right, but i take issue with the recipe.) i felt i had to participate in the making of fall cookies, so i brought these in to share.  just simple leaves, but with a blast of burgundy or red with the airbrush, then a quick sketch of veins.  i like how the watered-down food coloring sometimes makes a splotchy effect--leaves are never evenly dappled, and it looks so water-colorish.  (while they were drying i went to the craft store, and a leaf just like the larger green/burgundy one was lying next to my car.  nice.)
the cookie dough for something decorated is currently in the cooler and i welcome your suggestions for my inaugural, in-house, professional batch of decorated cookies to sell to the public.  more leaves?  pumpkins?  oh the Halloween ideas...  and when i get them made, i'll be sure to tell you all about the place.  for now i'm a mom on the go, and i have to post this quick, and meanwhile you can head over there and sample my banana bread (no nuts) and oatmeal/raisin/date cookies (with and without nuts).  yum.  go, eat, be merry!  and coming soon, ferrets!

some unrelated quickies...

often when i do a project i have some leftover dough, so i roll out a few, try a technique, and pass them along to a worthy someone.  recently, when it was snowing like crazy, hubby Jeff got a ride home from a coworker with an appreciation for pot-related humor.  so i made some pot-leaf cookies (got the cutter at Spencer's, btw) and some pot plants, made from Wilton's ice cream cone.  the first question with this  is always "are these special cookies?"  no.  just plain ol' cookies, i'm a good girl. but i got some green-marker practice in, and he got a nifty treat for being helpful. but i'm also thinking of making a Christmas ornament shape into a hooka...

then i tried a little plaid with the markers and airbrush.  i cut strips out of a big yogurt lid and sprayed once, then again after a 90 degree turn, then drew in some skinny lines.  these were just a test cookie; Jeff also brought these to work.  circles with patterns are nice filler cookies, like when you only need a few that are meticulously decorated, and a few dozen of something easy to make and share.  like pink on pink plaid would go so sweetly with a picture shape for a baby shower. or as you'll see coming up, cows and cow print circles.

and i did a Valentine's Day project for the niece and nephew, but we didn't head in that direction till the following Sunday when the cookies had gotten dry, so i sent them to work with Jeff.  they liked them anyway.  flood dots were outlined with edible marker on tiny hearts, with a few forget-me-nots.  maybe i'll do a Valentine's Day part 2, St Patrick edition, and make green hearts. :) green plaid hearts? 
and i'm still pondering a shape for an April Fool's Day birthday party...
and some lizards will be crawling this way...
and i know i'll make something for the office this month...  busy busy...

the bake sale

like i said, i'm behind, and these, dear reader, are from the pre-Christmas bake sale at Trinity Lutheran back in November. after this, i'm afraid, you'll be bored to death with months of the pictures of what i was doing over the Christmas season, all busy and stuff. there will be ornaments and poinsettia and snowflakes until Easter.
nah, you'll love it. it'll be like back before digital cameras and you didnt pick up your Christmas pictures from Walgreens until around Valentine's Day. "aw, remember those?" you'll say, and tilt your head and smile. you-> :)
so this is the batch of frosting that begat so many weird salmon pinks and deep yellows and dingey teals that i've been posting. i sometimes, like a song, get a color stuck in my head. i once brought home stacks of paint sample strips from hardware stores trying to find a purple for my hallway. [Gliddon, "smartypants"] and those couple of days i was thinking of a really tangy chartreuse, and a pale teal, and a terra cotta orange, and a chocolaty brown, and how they aren't the first 4 colors that you'd group together to say "Autumn!" but i've played around with odd colors before, like one fall had a bowl of mini leaves, and a third were purple. the audience's eye accepts electric yellow acorns, or purple leaves, because we subconsciously understand the nonsense aspect of it. it's magical enough that here are cookies that look like leaves; that some should be fantastical colors is perfectly acceptable too. so i made rusty orange leaves with ghostly blue veins, and the aforementioned electric yellow acorns, both in a junior size, like one bigger than mini, but still a kind of little cookie, and packaged them in pairs. Aunt Dahlas and Lois reported that they were quickly bought.
when i took this picture i was reminded of a documentary about the making of the movie Fantasia. this was back when artists sat at drafting tables and drew all day and brought a lunchbox to work. no boardrooms and focus groups. and this one guy had to come up with the forest that these little (it's been a while, cherubs? little centaurs?) were prancing through, but he wanted a really great color for the leaves. something really astoundingly not-treelike. then at lunch, one of his colleges was eating a slice of a jellyroll and he had a eureka moment over that berry-magenta of the jelly filling. so he went back and used that color to paint the trees. i paused for a moment and tried to imagine if such a tree were real, that these cookies were a just imitation, and i bet the bark would be blue, and roots all exposed and twisty. and i see 2 scenarios for such a palette: either it's a result of it being some crazy fantastic alien landscape, or some atmospheric event with moonlight shining on fall foliage during a frost, making those weird moonscape colors...
i totally over think it, but golly, it's just funner that way. and it's true, if something were paint by numbers, i never followed the directions. and later i'll rock your eyeballs with some purple snowflakes. :) and a bunch of other things. first i have to make purses and "plants" (yes, more Cheech-and-Chong fans) till then, high 5s!

"gobble gobble"

got a call from Lois from church, wondering if i had some time to make a few cookies for a the yearly bake sale. i always have time for cookies, plus i had an incomplete set of 2nd hand, brown, hand-glazed plates that i didn't need. 4 big plates, 2 small plates, and 3 mugs, all unfit for the microwave, and ultimately doomed to be dropped over the years. i'm a clutz. i buy my plates at the dollar store. anyway, i picked corn, leaves, apples, and mini pumpkins, leaves and acorns. then i arranged them all nicely in/on their mug/plate, wrapped with cellophane, and put the 12 or so extras in favor bags. i'm told they sold out. (yay!)
in the meantime, they caught Dian's eye, and she ordered more corn and leaves for thanksgiving. this time i added a few purple kernels. i love how any color works--this shape is definitly in my top 10 favorites. thanks Dian!

('hey katie, your pictures are starting to look a little fuzzy.' yeah, as it gets darker and colder, i'm working with poorer light, plus i just recently got new contacts, and it turns out i really needed them! moving on...)


then mom remembered the turkeys i made for Eldra last year and wanted 2 dozen made the same way. i wrecked about 6 before i remembered how i did the tail last time. these little guys drove with mom and dad to thanksgiving at my brother's in indiana.

and then for fun, i made these for Andrew and Grace. one lost a head en route. :( but i'm sure he was delicious.

my halloween disguise: fondant master!

i recently had an opportunity to apply for a cookie decorator position (i know, can you believe it?) and was asked if i had any pictures of my work with fondant. (i know, can you believe it?) they were really looking for cake decorators who also probably did cookies. i'm finding a sort of friendly bias against cookies among the pretty-dessert fans. i get that a monumental wedding cake, or a complex scene around the birthday cake is no small task, (believe it or not, i watch all the cake shows for ideas. i figure anything they can do vertically, unless it involves motors, can certainly lie flat on a cookie, right?) and that the magic that a cake creator is conjuring involves all the party goers all getting a chance to admire the piece, exclaim that they cant believe it's edible, and what hours it must have taken, and to let all that wonder seep in like they're looking at the thing itself, not the 3 foot recreation in devil's food, ganache and (you know it) fondant. i get that it's about the big ta-da. cookies are more one-on-one, but a cake is for the group's visual pleasure--then the party-goers relinquish its beauty to the knife, and everyone is served something that is only as wonderful as the execution of its recipe. in fact, their portions of the fondant shell are peeled off by those who know, or sampled, then peeled off by those who just figured it out: fondant is just for show.
a funny thing is happening to cakes though--they're shrinking into cupcakes. photorealist painter Audrey Flack (check her out) wrote about how culture is transported over time and space more by the small things we can carry--our totems and ingots and trinkets--than by the megalithic structures that are eventually abandoned or built over. economic pressure makes people take what's easy to carry. and i'm betting that during a recession, a box of cupcakes is way easier to drive around than a cake. they're also way-easy to make at home since a) you can fake it with a boxed mix and b) decorating is more about alluding to the flavors (a sexy swirl of chocolate drizzled with caramel, etc) rather than making the cupcake look like a frog (though the team behind Hello Cupcake are geniuses at that.)
plus, cupcakes are perfectly suited to that urge in humans to have something special all to themselves. that big 3-tiered cake is not yours alone, you have to share it. you only get a piece of it, with a fondant remnant stuck to the side. but a cupcake, with it's flourished whipped peak, and dazzling sprinkles, and perfect gooey bite of something in the middle--that is the essence of a full cake contained in a single serving art-form that you can take your selfish time enjoying.
but cupcakes are more like cake-meets-truffle. when i say "decorated" i mean "to look like something." frosting and sprinkles, though decorative, is really just "frosted and sprinkled." i like the illusions that people are inventing with cake. and if it must be wrapped in fondant to look like a giant birthday frog or whatever, so be it. but what if it could look like multiple whatevers, and be personal servings, and stackable and transportable, and didn't have fondant at all? (pointing obnoxiously to the cookies)
i must wait for this idea to gain momentum. until then, i must make friends with fondant.
i've worked with kneadable media. ceramics mostly, modeling clay, marzipan, all delightful. fondant has been my backdrops for my little scenes, but only as a canvas for icing and sugar. fondant on cookies seemed unnecessary, unless you want texture rolled into the surface, and i've even seen a neat printed effect, but both involve cutting out the same shape in fondant, then attaching it to the surface of the cookie. the whole surface. what do you do when that dries? scrape the cookie off the back with your bottom teeth? or try to look cool while you eat a big mouthful of fondant? maybe, i thought, since it is edible, if not exactly palatable, it were just tiny little bits that you might not notice? so i made a few prototypes. forgive their smudges, these were only for practice...


if you popped in yesterday, you saw my brother's over-the-hill cookies. i thought roses looked more mournful, but during the practice run i made a pumpkin patch. those stems are individual chocolate jimmy sprinkles.

this was a mini fondant ghost on a mini tombstone. i rolled the fondant paper thin so i could almost see through it, and so that it tore lightly at the bottom like a little sheet. a fine tipped brush and food coloring did the details.

paper-thin ribbons were cut and placed on wet white icing. the white icing on top made me think the fondant wasn't necessary, unless you didn't want to make time for layers of piping to dry. the red eyes are fun though.



a worm in an apple.










ruffles on some high-heels.








this was 3 colors of fondant rolled together, cut with a tiny leaf cutter, smooshed a little into a curve, dusted with bronze pearl dust, a little vein line painted with food coloring, then adhered to the "tree" to let the "moon" peek through.

hubby brought these to work. reviews were all positive. i ate a tree, and didn't hate the level of fondant, but i did prefer it picked off. would i do it again? sure. all the time? no. "can i work with fondant?" you betcha.

speaking of frogs...

Brenda wondered if i could help her out with her some thank-you cookies for her daughters' teachers. 'something for summer' with frogs and fishing specified. after falling in love with how i make frogs (see the previous post below) i was happy to do another round of froggies. plus the fish, some leaves with a little beetle, orange monarchs, daisies, and my other favorite, strawberries. Brenda reports that all feedback was positive.
"my work here is done," i said as i shook hands with the townspeople and rode into the sunset... but there i was being narrative again. no, Brenda's cookies didn't end there. these cookies were characters and scenery meant to evoke feelings of summer at the lake. while in parts, they're adorable cookies. when en scene, they're quite a little picture, worth a thousand words. so i baked a handful of extras and made another scene, like "planet cookie" ...maybe "cookie lake"?

i enjoy making these. if i did it for a living, i'd make one every 3 days. i probably could with the ideas that keep popping up in my head. the current one in progress will be for christmas. the next one... suggestions? perhaps something literary. i'll daydream on it.

backlogged and beclovered...

what happens when you try to shut off your extra phone line but keep the dsl? long story short, it was a challenging work order and i'm behind with posting pics for ya'll. other fun fiascos kept me from making valentine's day cookies which totally guilted me out, obsessive baker/artist/holiday-decorator that i am, so i got everyone back for st. patty's day. all the kids and big kids got a pair of shamrocks and handfull of green m&ms, tied with a bow. check out the march post of leprechauns and pots of gold, too.

happy november!

here's what i was up to in november--a traditional collection for eldra's monthly dozen, and a buncha corn for the folks at work. at first i thought the turkey was too intimidating, but it was nothing compared to those individual corn kernels. but i like challenges :)

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...