UMHB Graduation Cookies... Congrats! (Gluten Free)

These were made for a friend's daughter that is graduating from the University of Mary Hardin Baylor as a Nurse. Her mom, Nancy from R.O.C.K., is ecstatic and is throwing her a party with friends and family to celebrate. Nancy was my very first customer for her younger daughter who graduated from Texas Tech earlier this year (texas-tech-graduation-first-order). The twist on this order was that the graduate has gluten allergies and she wanted at least a few to be gluten free so she could enjoy them. Her mom threw down the challenge when she thought I could only do simple ones as gluten free and it was okay to make the cute ones with the normal flour... Well that just doesn't work. The guest of honor should be able to eat the best ones, right? I took a few tries but I got it. These were great, by the time they were decorated you could hardly tell the gluten free from the normal recipe. I was so excited when I got these done I rushed to box them up and almost forgot to take a picture... if you were curious at all the graduate girls and the hearts were gluten free while the chapel tower and the nurse scrubs were standard vanilla bean.

Cookie's Cookies

Jerry's Birthday Cookies

My friend and coworker, who I have done many cookies for in the past, told her mom about my new hobby and she decided to put me to the test. I apologize in advance for the really bad pics. I wish I had a good excuse but it was really early in the morning when I started boxing them up and I'm just glad I remembered to use the camera at all.

This set was for a friend that was turning 60. I was told his pride and joys are a '57 Corvette and a sailboat named Synchrony. His hobbies were crabbing, fishing, and duck hunting. This one was kind of fun because I could be really creative with what I wanted to do. We decided on a corvette and a sail boat of course, then a duck decoy, a fish, and a Maryland blue crab, since that's what he fishes for. I love the net behind the crab :) She said the birthday boy enjoyed them a lot... onto the next order....

ECU Tailgating Cookies... go Pirates!

The next order for Cookie was going to attend an ECU tailgating party. I'd done a few college things before but ECU had very stylized everything so this was a little bit of a challenge. We decided to use a little bit of liberty and try to embrace the spirit of ECU rather than be a photo copy of their logos and mascot. I went out a bought the skull and cross bone cutter and I found a really cute little pirate hat that we bought as well and I used on top of my skull and cross bones :)

Garnet and Gold all the way...

So my sister-in-law has passed around pics of her "surprise" cookies to all her fellow alumni friends. I received an email from a friend of a friend that wanted some cookies to send her daughter that was starting FSU with 2 friends. Since not everyone is into football I wanted to expand the sports theme and asked what other sports they enjoyed. We decided on a football helmet, softball, and soccer ball. I tried a lot of new techniques on these and I am soooo happy with the way they came out, just look at that soccer ball, not an outline in the whole thing. They went in the mail today so hopefully all the girls enjoy their FSU gift box.

More pics here.

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.