after the wine auction in September, i got an email from 3 Vines Cafe in Sleepy Hollow (visit
here). they saw my cookies at the auction, and could i do the same cookie for their dinner party, and once again, i turned cookie dough into wine. ok, pictures of wine.
since their logo features red grapes, i stuck to the red/purple shades, and kept the "glass" gold. after getting a feel for it once, round 2, to me, looks quite improved. it was October, and i was getting a little 5-year-oldish about Halloween coming (death! candy! blood! glitter!), and i feared a repeat (and large) order would get monotonous, and i would get frustrated, and then i'd slop it all up. of course i was wrong. i reminisced about my October wedding, and made them all elegant and sparkly, and pouted when i ran out of cookies.
you know i actually used to fear that if i did what i loved, every day, i'd eventually hate it? i have a kind of ADD when it comes to arts and crafts--i crochet, paint, bead, sew, repurpose, wield a camera, (write long droning blog posts) and can make pottery on a wheel, but eventually i put it away and months go by. cookies i could do. every. day. i get that arrived-at-my-happy-place feeling, like a toddler with a blanky, or a stressed college kid with a cigarette.
but now that sounds like i'm addicted, a word which to me speaks to a more self-conscious and anxious frame of mind. and that happy-place is the opposite. i rarely make a cookie design that's an expression of Me. you're not
meant to understand me, human, katie, artist, when i make a cookie that looks like a football helmet. it's either a request from someone else, or an attempt to convey something more archetypal to an audience, which by definition is also "someone else." there is a story to be told about [a change, a milestone, an event] and it needs at least one visual. one picture, for the first thousand words. when i'm decorating cookies, i'm part of the illustrative process. in a way, i created nothing especially new. foodwise, it's the same cookie. but in decorating it, i also convey, translate, reveal, represent... i enjoy how it is to be a conduit between "that concept" and "this cookie."
hubby Jeff loves the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but i love the 'making-of' bonus features. (remember, i used to strive for a special effects/make up career, and LOTR spared
nuh-thing.) the crew devises a way to mold PVC into metal-looking rings (plastic is lighter) and 2 gents got to work essentially making the chain mail for every actor in every battle in all 3 movies. every day, linking little rings. every work day. for 4 years. !! then the camera was pointed at one and he said, "i wouldn't trade a minute of it for anything, it was the most amazing thing i've done in my life." i toast my wine cookie to that dude.
and also to 3 Vines, for enabling my happy little compulsion, and letting me translate their concepts. owner Flicka emailed that they were stunning. (i bow.) my pleasure.
coming up, i lend a hand to another fundraiser, i mix crazy colors for a bake sale, i make Vanessa some nude cookies (it's only sorta what you think), a lone shoe, lavender snow, poinsettias, choir bells, (award winning!) Bill-Cosby-sweateresque ornaments, Santa Frog, and more ornaments from an evening of (omg!) teaching!
these were for the office cookie exchange. i can now say my cookies are award winning, as i took home the coveted "Best Decorated" trophy Starbucks giftcard. i rule.
the Zellmer Childhood Disease Foundation is named for Mary and Paul Zellmer’s son Jim, who was diagnosed with Type I diabetes when he was 6. to raise awareness and find a cure, they began Pumpkins for a Cure, which is now in it's 7th year of bringing pumpkins every fall to folks around Geneva, IL, and hope to kids with Juvenile Diabetes. read more here to learn more. big high 5 from me, pumpkin farms are awesome!
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.
with the remaining "flesh tones," and yellow, blue and pink, i did a series of wet-on-wet designs that, when dry, i outlined with a food writing marker to mimic tattoos. little simple tattoo cliches, but mostly i wanted to practice with the marker, and make some mental notes about icing drying times. (the picture was taken inside, so forgive the greenish-orange.) and i cant make one cookie without thinking of 20 more, so i'll probably be using this technique all year...
after the wine auction in September, i got an email from 3 Vines Cafe in Sleepy Hollow (visit here). they saw my cookies at the auction, and could i do the same cookie for their dinner party, and once again, i turned cookie dough into wine. ok, pictures of wine. 
and after the afore-blogged white pumpkins and the to-be-blogged wine-glass-encore, i made Rita some cowgirl cookies. there was a also hat cookie, but it was cosmetically damaged, but that's ok because the rest of them were [rootin' tootin' ding-dang!] awesome. my other horse cookie cutter is more toy-like; this one turned out more like the animal. but i still gave it a gold mane and something eye-catching on the butt. [i couldn't help it, there had to be some nod to My Little Pony. i think i had my niece Grace in mind--horse lover, Nancy Sinatra sing-alonger--through this whole project.]
the boot's gold pattern was done by laying a stencil over the dried icing, lightly sketching where the spaces fell with an edible marker, then piping with gold. when just dry, i dusted with gold pearl dust.
and i had been dying to try a wet-on-wet technique and combine it with the black marker to make bandannas. white icing was piped right after the pastel so it flattened together. then when dry, i added the black details. it's more the imitation of a motif, than actual bandanna patterns, but i adore them.
the colors themselves are a result of just finishing with some experimental colors for the church bake sale (chartreuse acorns, and brick-red leaves with blue veins) and while they were drying, i added the previous colors to the new icing plus different ratios of red teal and yellow, resulting in these fabulous kitchen-of-tomorrow, 57-Chevy colors. i wanted to sing "stand by your man."
pumpkins lately have been so freaky-genetic-experiment colored and textured that i just couldn't do orange. i've seen drippy dark green, lumpy grey, and even salmon pink, but one of my favorites is the smooth ivory variety. they're like the ghosts of pumpkins. the cookies are pretty basic--piped in sections, some edible marker lines on the stem--but my nifty moment with these was realizing the perspective a little better; notice you can see the "top" of the pumpkin "behind" the stem?
