Wednesday, August 29, 2012

The year 2012 brought with it the Super Bowl XLVI which hosted the New England Patriots vs The New York Giants. To my delight our family was invited to a Super Bowl Party.  I decided to try my hand at my very first cookies designed by myself.

This took about a week of research on the computer because being the avid football fan that I am (not) I had no clue of anything about either of these teams... except of course that one of them was from New York.  I learned a lot about NFL and AFL and team colours and logos and jerseys and football stuff.  I printed my images off of google and set out to work.  First off I baked.  Then I made the icing.  Colouring the icing came next and lucky me these two teams had a lot of the same colours.  Finally the decorating.  (thank goodness I have a wonderful husband who didn't say one single word about the state of our kitchen during this time - or the rest of the house for that matter).

And here is what I was able to take to the party:













For the most part I was very pleased with this platter. But I was still struggling with icing consistency for writing and had not yet learned about clear vanilla or americolor bright white.  I even tried using the silver luster dust on the Patriots helmets but my first try turned out so horrible that my kids got to eat them.  Still need to work on that technique as well.  That's okay though - it's a learning curve - and when you can eat your mistakes how can one go wrong?


Tuesday, August 28, 2012

I have been learning the art of cookie decorating via some very talented ladies on the internet.  If you peruse through Pinterest you have no doubt seen photos of some of their very amazing works of art.  And here are some of my first cookies done with the lessons from the likes of Sweet Sugar Belle, Sweetopia, Cookie Craze, Ali Bee and a few others.

  

These were done in October 2011 for a
 County Fair at my kids school and were
 auctioned off as a fund raiser.  Sure hope
 the winner enjoyed them.  These were my
 very first royal icing cookies.

So after I tried my hand at the festive pumpkins I started to think about the holidays.  Luck would have it that someone from the kids school asked if I would make cookies for the faculty christmas party.  Yeah - a new challenge. So I pulled out some old holiday cookie cutters and began an entire day of baking.  Having read that the sugar cookie will stay pretty fresh for a very long time and would freeze well I thought it a good idea to stock up and get all my baking done in one day.  Here are some of the creations I came up with and the finished platter for the faculty event.








They were a big hit and I got lots a happy smiles from the teachers.

So with my confidence at a high point I read Sweet Sugar Belles posting on how to make sock monkey cookies and went right out to purchased the cutter and made these cute little holiday monkies...



The sweetest little winter monkey ever.

Now I am officially hooked.  UPS, FedEx and USPS are getting to know me very well as cookie cutters start arriving by the boxful.  LOVE _ LOVE _ LOVE shopping online. More time to bake of course.  And best of all - my whole family is getting into it.

I close for now but will continue the saga of my cookie journey (and how I developed my oCd-obsessive cookie disorder) tomorrow.