A manly set of cookies

Not the best pic, but, here are some quick, fun tool themed cookies for a friend of ours who's about to do some house remodeling

Floral themed cookie collection

Cookies for the fabulous Tricia Dunlap of Dunlap Portraits... Seriously if you are anywhere near Austin and want some awesome pics... Tricia blows me away (check her out, http://dunlapportrait.com/). I did these as part of a celebration for her husbands Grandmother. I love the color palette, soft yet still kinda modern... I think I have to go back and find a few more of these plates Tricia, I hope you and your family enjoy them!

Birthday cookies for a big Indians fan :)

Happy Birthday Mama Elsie! These are heading your way tomorrow and I know what a big Indians fan you are so I hope you and the family enjoy them... if you share ;)

Viera Suntree Little League, finale

Doctor Who birthday celebrates love

Chocolate Covered Strawberries... as cookies!!

I am soooo proud of these. I went thru mulitple recipes to get it just right because these don't just look like Valentine's Days favorite treat but they taste just like it too. A good strawberry, not fake, tasting cookie with a strawberry liquor and chocolate ganache royal icing... these were so good I wish I had made twice as many because I want to eat more and I bearly had enough for my orders.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Here is what my kitchen looked like at 7 am this morning... these were all naked when I got home from work at 6 pm last night. All in all there were about 460 cookies decorated for a work Christmas bazaar. I did Sweet Sugarbell's Orange Gingerbread cookie recipe along with my own Eggnog and Candy Cane flavors this year. I found the cutest bags at Target and Hobby Lobby and tried to do cookies to match. It was a lot of work but they were very well received... next year I may have to do more ;)

Dishonored launch party

These are for the Dishonored launch party tonight. The game was done by Arkane Studios and Bethesda. The game looks great, check out their website here (http://www.dishonored.com/). The blood splatters were especially fun to try and recreate along with the tattoo the main character wears on his wrist as well as the mark of the plague (the red "x"). The game looks awesome and I felt honored to be included on such a special night for Arkane Studios here in Austin, TX.

I pledge allegiance to the flag...

Happy Father's Day

I got an email from the mom I did the "Little Man" cookies for asking if I could do some gluten free Father's Day cookies for her husband. She was open to anything I wanted to do as long as it was "Dad" themed. I've always wanted to try text heavy cookies so I figured this would be a good one to try them on. I found these great printable tags that I modified and mixed and matched till I got what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to try my new word burst cookie cutter so I looked up different ways to say "Father" in different languages (there were a few more that didn't make it in the pic).  I think the colors came out great and the dad ended up liking them a lot too :)

Ka-Chow! Car's cookies for Ollie

You may remember that I did cookies for Ollie's 1st Birthday last year, they were the first birthday cookies with all the images of things that started with the letter "O," if you forgot you can see them here. Well this year the bar was raised. They asked for Cars theme cookies, more specifically... Lightening McQueen, Mater, and Sally. Williams Sonoma had these great Cars cookies cutters, but no Sally. I decided to modify Finn and give him a gender switch, I think she came out pretty cute. It's har to tell but Lightening is actually a red velvet flavored cookie, I loved the bright red color it made the dough. These were involved, I'm not going to say I'd be willing to do them everyday... but these were fun :)

Beach Party Birthday

I got a call from a friend, who also does cookies, asking for help. She was planning her daughter's birthday party, and didn't have time to make her own cookies... What could I do but say, YES! She had these really cute invites that she was trying to match that had flip-flops and this great beach ball on it. I thought for a long time how to avoid having to do two separate cookies for the flip-flops and then it hit me... a heart! I'm sure someone else has thought of it before, but I've never seen it so I was new to me. The colors worked out great, nice and bright. They all got bagged up with little flip-flop bags and flip-flop keychains tied to them with different colored ribbon, it was a very cute presentation that she had figured out. I had a blast making these and I'm really glad I was able to help out a friend.

Happy Mother's Day, Part 1

It's Mother's Day, and I was asked to make cookie for two very special moms. This set was for a "classy" mom who loved black and white with just a little red for accent. I immediately thought of  a guest post by Ali-Bee on Sweet Sugar Bell's blog who did a tutorial on creating brush embroidery (here) and thought this would be a great time to give it a shot. I really liked the way these came out. I was a little afraid of doing black and white cookies for Mother's Day and that they'd be a little odd but all in all I think these were exactly what she wanted.

Here comes the SpiderMan!

(Description coming soon)

Warner Brothers... meet Disney.

My newest order was for an old college friend that contacted me for a quick last minute favor. Her mom is celebrating her 60th birthday on Thursday and the family is having a surprise party for her in Kentucky. As if the party wasn't enough, they are also surprising her with a trip to Orlando so she can visit the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios and visit Disney World... thus the Mickey meets Harry cookies :) I wanted to try and tie them all together so I carried the same colors thru most of the cookies. I love the way Harry came out. Harry and the Mickey with the buttons are the only un-altered cookies... all the other ones were custom made. The cupcakes came out super cute and my husband decided to help me and picked out yellow and red sprinkles out of my rainbow bottle for me, very patient and very awesome of him.

A Family Reunion in Maryland

Shhh, it's a surprise. My good friend Abby asked me to make her some cookies to take with her to a family reunion she is on a plane flying to right now. I wasn't allowed to post pictures of anything until after she got there because her mom loves Facebook and we are friends :) I had so much fun making these, we had a whole list of ideas but settled on Crabs (you know, cuz it's Maryland), Chickens (because supposedly they are well known for their cooked chicken), and to surprise her grandma we did "Mom P" cookies, complete with bright pink lipstick. I have to admit, grandma was a bit of a challenge to figure out. I had to do these all in one night so I couldn't do too many layers that had to dry... then I discovered food markers! These things are awesome! I drew out 10 heads with hair and then just filled in the lines, easy as pie. I cannot wait to hear how the family likes them... I'll post an update if I hear anything.

See more pictures here.

Just a little bite...

My son discovered that there was a whole table of freshly baked cookies in the dining room... and no one was guarding them. I noticed he was very quiet and called out to him, he had one cookie just barely in his mouth. I asked him what he thought he was doing and his response was, "it's only a little bite," as he carefully placed it back on the stack with the others. I wanted to be mad but we'd never discussed which cookies were his and which were off limits. I stayed up that night working on a "secret" project and when I was done I looked down at "his" cookie and decided to make it his for real. He was so excited to have a cookie with his name on it and promised to only eat cookies out of the jar in the kitchen from now on.

(Daddy got one too since I didn't want him to feel left out, the boys got to have theirs together the next afternoon)

Get Russ to Kenya

So we have a friend that is working with CTC International (a world community outreach that enables less fortunate areas of our world experience something better) to teach art skills at a local orphanage and help them find ways to create income using their creativity. He's going to be filming a documentary while he's there and I am so excited for him that he is going to get this opportunity to go and help. Since I don't have the cash to donate, I told him I would make him cookies and he could try and sell them at work... any money he gets goes toward his trip. I found this flag cookie cutter and wanted to do something that related to where he was going instead of something just fun. I hope everyone likes them and they can bring him a few dollars to help out. If you are feeling generous and want to donate, or if you just want to learn more about the program, here is a link to the CTC and Russ's team.

More cookie pictures here.

Update: He got enough money :) After much work and wonderful friends, Russ raised the money he needed for his trip and is all set to go sometime in the next few weeks. Thanks to everyone who supported his cause and congrats to Russ, have a blast and do some good for a change ;)

Texas Tech Graduation - First Order

After last weeks Memorial Day cookies, Mrs. Nancy (who runs The R.O.C.K), was kind enough to trust me with making cookies for her daughter's graduation party from Texas Tech. She asked me to make some girl cookies with long blonde hair like her daughter and another set of the Texas Tech logo. I was super excited to do these because it was technically my first real "order" and it was going to be a challenge, 2 dozen of each. We decided to do the girls as a vanilla cookie and the logos as a dark chocolate cookie since the logo had a lot of black in it. I ended up custom creating each of these cookies.

The girl cookies were based on another blog I read regularly where she showed how to combine two cookies cutters to make one cookie. The logos I made a template out of card stock and hand cut each one so I would have all the right angles. I also started experimenting with my icings at this point and tried to make a dark coco royal icing instead of using a whole bottle of black food coloring and staining everyone's mouth black. I was very excited to discover that adding my black coco directly to the royal icing until I got a very dark brown resulted in only having to add 2 drops of back to push it away from being brown. I did a test and it reacted perfectly, piped great, dried nice and glossy, and tasted great! I will never make standard "black" icing again, this recipe rocks! The logos were outlined with white, flooded with red then allowed to dry. I then went back the next morning and painted all the black shadows and bevels on the logo to make it really punch and complete the look.

I was told as a follow up that Mrs. Nancy's daughter LOVED the cookies, which totally made my day. See more pics and a photo of the entire order here.