Harvest Candy Corn... yes, they do taste different!

They all taste the same... right? It's funny because there is a discussion every year around this time in our house over this "harvest mix" of sweet goodness. We know they are all the exact same ingredients but somehow our brain has us convinced that some taste better than others... I'm tricking my sister's brain and sending her come cookies to taste test this year ;)

Johnson Park in Marble Falls... Halloween charity sale

I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a group called Ride-On which does therapeutic horse training with vets with a group called A Place of Hope who give free medical care to vets who do not have insurance or can't afford treatment. I had so much fun working on these designs and actually doing Halloween cookies for change. If you're in the area (Marble Falls) and want to stop buy, come on down and take a look.

Oktoberfest 2013... Happy Birthday Billy!

Oktoberfest cookies! Well, technically they are birthday cookies with an Oktoberfest theme for a only and only Mr. Billy who is turning 40. These were a surprise so shhhhh, don't tell him ;)

Wedding favor ideas for a fall wedding

I've been working on my photo taking, what do you think? So my sister-in-law has a friend that is getting married in November. Her save the date cards were of the couple sitting in a movie theater watching a movie with the caption, "the best show is yet to come." Although she asked for fall leaves because of the season of the wedding, we thought we'd give them an alternate option that reflected their fun personalities and relate to their early announcements. So the above is option #1 for them to consider. The image below is closer to what they asked for, something clean and slightly modern that represents fall. I posted pictures of the fall leaves that I did for the Austin Bakes for Bastrop sale... this is why those were included for the bake sale. I really wanted to do a sample of these to send and to try out the new recipe for Brown Sugar Spice with Maple icing. The feedback from the sale was great so I feel like this could be an awesome addition to my fall line-up of flavors. This is also a preview of my new labels :)

Austin Bakes for Bastrop... the final tallys

I was absolutely humbled today by the amount of love that was baked into sugary treats this weekend to help the victims of the Bastrop wildfires. The event had set a goal of $10,000... that's a lot of money for bake sale but we were determined to reach it. At last count we were at $12,561.79!! Wow is all I can say. I started looking around at the fellow bakers from my sale and then going online to see what everyone else brought to the party. All I can say is it's a good thing we spread out or I would of bought one of everything I saw :) My final tally at the end of 4 very long days were: 18 Texas Flags, 12 Double layer Sunflowers, approximately 36 fall leaves, 6 pumpkins, 6 acorns, 18 red, white, & blue star "bites," and 36 texas "bites" with hearts. I am trying not to fall asleep as I type this because I really wanted to get a post in today. So much work but soooo worth every minute. I met a lot of very nice people today and got to try a new recipe, Brown Sugar Spice with Maple frosting, and they were delicious!

(Sorry about the pictures, it was really early in the morning so I had zero light to work with other than my flash and an incandescent overhead light)

I'm ready for fall

The weather here has been a tad on the warm side lately and it makes me long for fall. I wanted to add something personal to the FSU cookies I was sending my sister-in-law and one of her favorite things are sunflowers. These started as simple flowers and as I was using a small chocolate cookies as a guide for my center circle, I decided to just drop it down and see what happend. These ended up being double layered using chocolate royal icing as glue and just a few little dots to set off the center. I could see making a whole tray of these in a few months... I may even try doing this in the cookie dough stage by cutting a hole in the bottom cookie and putting the chocolate cookie dough in the hole before it bakes so they are flush. In my head it sounds cool, we'll see what happens :)

Here you can see both cookies stacked using the icing as glue. I had to stack them first and then decorate so I didn't ice over my flower petals.