thankful cookies

i did about 4 dozen Thanksgiving themed cookies for The Meet Market.  fall-colored stripes, sunflowers, 2-toned airbrushed apples, metallic indian corn, and handprint turkeys.  lets hope they sell out, i have about 5 more designs i want to try!  come on in and pick up a few--share with your friends and tell 'em thanks.  in addition, if you fill out the tag attached to each bag with your name and contact information, you'll be entered to win one of 3 dozen holiday cookies in December.  lucky winners will be drawn at the annual Community Thanksgiving Dinner in Elgin.  (can't wait!)
stick around for zombies and little birdies, and then we're on to Christmas...

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.

...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!

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!

white pumpkins, black friday

i mentioned i'm employed now--not at a bakery, but they're good folk, i'll help 'em out.. (i've worked/baked for them before, have a read from winter of '09-'10) and it's temporary, so i have to keep my mad skillz sharp. or maybe they'll realize they should keep me and i'll bring them snacks. either way, i'm baking, might as well take more pictures and share. :) so that's what these are for, but i was supposed to bring them on Halloween. i got all 3 of us in the car that morning, and all our junk and forgot the plate. so the following Tuesday i wished my colleagues a happy November. it's brown, it works.
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?
then the circles were supposed to be lace, as well-sprayed and defined as the black and purple/orange/green witch dresses last month. the trick is to use a cotton lace. cotton absorbs what doesn't directly land on the cookie. with a polyester lace, like i used here, it doesn't soak into the fibers, so as soon as it's wet, it bleeds right through anyway, right out the other side onto the cookie. so i didn't get my lacy look, but then i got the brown marker out again and outlined the blobs, and it ended up looking kind of like burled wood. then i brushed the circles with bronze dust, and the pumpkins with gold, and they all looked like an elegant day in the forest.
i was going to scheme about another plate-of-the-month project when i learned that mid-December our office is holding a cookie exchange. (aw naw they di'int) oh yes, and a contest too. part of me says "oh boy, sharing and participation and cookies and fun!" and the other part is bringing a cookie tin of whoop-ass. no, i will not roundhouse kick anyone's snickerdoodles, i was kidding. but the audience will be bigger, so i gotta rock'em. stay tuned.
also on the way, cowgirl cookies, tattoo experiments, stenciled logos, high heels, wine part 2, and strange colors at the bake sale.

autumn montage!

"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.

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 :)

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.