My First Attempts

Ok, so this all started last March when my mother-in-law and I took cake decorating classes at the local Michael's.  Here's my first cake:

My son's first birthday fell within a few days of this class, so I made it into a birthday cake.  Not so pretty, but he didn't seem to mind.

Then I made a similar cake for my husband's birthday.  He's a Star Wars fan, so this was his selection:

Then I took the second course on flowers.  Here was the final cake for that class:

 And then there was the final class on fondant and gum paste.  I'm not much of a fan of fondant, but it was interesting to learn.

From there, I started playing on my own with cookies.  I first saw it on Our Best Bites.  I started out using their glace icing.  Here's my first attempts: cookies for Fourth of July.

 Then for Halloween, I made some pumpkins, bats, and spiderwebs that I thought turned out pretty cute.

And then for Thanksgiving, I made some acorns, turkeys, and maple leaves. 

This was my last attempt at glace icing.  Although I like the taste of it more than royal icing, it was so hard to get nice detailing with it.  The only way to get good definition (for me at least), I had to make it so stiff that it was hard to pipe.  Also, I noticed that a day or two after the icing dried, it got a sort of cloudy look to it that wasn't so appealing.  So then I tried my hand at royal icing.  My first attempt was for my first paying order that I mentioned yesterday.

It went ok.  Some of the cookies dried a bit splotchy, and I've figured out that my piping icing was a bit too stiff, so it didn't flow very smoothly.  On my next order, I thinned the piping icing quite a bit more, and it went a lot smoother.

Which brings us to my latest project.  We were invited to the first birthday party of our realtor's little girl, so I made her some cookies:

I thought they turned out pretty well.  Not perfect, but definitely improving.