Flower Cookies (Sanity Sunday)

I had a great plan for these cookies.  I found a really cute flowery design in some planner pages the other day and thought I'd give it a try on some cookies with my kopykake.  I also tried SugarBelle's chocolate chip rollout cookie recipe for the first time (hence the speckled look), and they spread like crazy.  Then when I tried to use the kopykake, I couldn't get it to focus in the right size, and I was way too lazy to do what I would normally do - take a picture of the image (which is easier than trying to get the scanner to work), resize it and print it out.  So I tried to freehand it.  Yeah...combine that with the fact that due to said laziness, I chose to use one consistency of icing, and it wasn't working so much.  (I know that a lot of people only ever use one consistency of icing, but I have finally decided that it is not for me!  Although it's quicker because I don't have to make two consistencies and bottle/bag each, I make way more mistakes and it's hard for me to get accurate, crisp lines.)  So I just went into play mode with these cookies and did a bunch of flowers. 

These tasted really great, but I wouldn't make theme again because they spread a lot and were much greasier than my usual sugar cookies.  And they were pretty difficult to cut because of the chocolate chips. 

I really loved the colors I made though.  I've been working on my ability to color match (which I had a hard time with at first) and I think I'm finally getting the hang of it.  I bought a little color wheel at the craft store that shows what happens when you add different colors, and that has helped me a lot in figuring out how to get certain colors.  Anyway, these were a great match for the colors I was going for.

Teacher Appreciation Cookies

Last Monday I found out that it was teacher appreciation week, so I thought it would be fun to do something special for the people at my little guy's preschool.  After searching many craft blogs to figure out something to do for them, with such little time I thought I'd stick with a tried and true gift:  cookies.  I wanted to keep it simple, so I just did mini apple cookies, with just a little bit of variation.

I used a tiny fluted circle cutter to cut out the bites.  And I got to use my Cricut to make some cute little tags.  I had to take the pictures on a very gloomy morning, so it was impossible to get good coloring on the pictures.  One of these days I'll actually go so far as getting a little lightbox so that the colors look better, but I really know nothing about photography and I have way too many hobbies to take on another one right now. 

I hope everyone had a good Mother's Day!  Here's a picture of me and my little guy.  He was a bit too busy to stay still for some pictures, and this was actually as good as we could get.  Oh well.  There are so few pictures of me and my little guy (I'm usually the one behind the camera), so this will have to do.

Star Wars Cookies

My husband's birthday was last weekend, but it kind of got trumped by Easter, so we celebrated this weekend instead.  I got some new Star Wars vehicles cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma a little while ago, but had yet to play with them.  Man, were they a pain in the butt!  They're supposed to stamp the image onto the cookie, but it's pretty tricky to get a good image without the dough sticking into the stamp.  They needed quite a few colors mixed up, so I got lazy and decided to try only making one consistency of icing instead of using thicker icing to outline and detail and thinner icing to flood.  It was less time consuming, but the finer details didn't turn out so much.  But here are the ones that turned out.

Can you tell I liked the Death Stars?

My First Easter Dinner!

This is completely un-cookie related, but I thought I'd share that yesterday I cooked my first Easter dinner!  Normally we go to my in-laws with the whole extended family for a potluck-style dinner, but this year my husband and I decided to just do Easter dinner with our own little family. 

For appetizers, I tried a new recipe for deviled eggs from Cook's Country magazine,

and The Pioneer Woman's Avocado Crab Dip.  Avocados, cream cheese, crab, how could it go wrong?

And then there was dinner.  I made spiral glazed ham with maple-orange glaze (from America's Test Kitchen), cheesy potatoes, green beans with creamy mushrooms and shallots (from Martha Stewart Living), and soft and chewy rolls (from Cook's Country). 

I know the potatoes look like weird scrambled eggs in the picture, but they were delicious.  I don't usually cook with processed foods, but this casserole has cream of mushroom soup and velveeta "cheese", and it's so good!  This was my first every try at ham, and it turned out perfectly.  Of course, with just my husband, toddler, and I, we now have ham coming out of our ears!

For dessert I made butterbeer cake from Sugarcrafter, which was also very yummy.  Sorry, I didn't get a picture of that one. 

It was obviously much more work than the usual potluck dinner, but it was so much fun getting to create a menu full of our favorite foods!

And here are a couple of pictures from an Easter egg hunt at our church on Saturday.

I hope everyone had a happy Easter!

Easter Cookies (Again)

One of the moms at my son's preschool program ordered these cookies for Easter. 



Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award

Jill from Dulce Dough has awarded me with the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award!  Thank you so much, Jill!  The achiever in me was so excited to get an award!   When I originally started this blog, I wasn't so sure that anybody would actually be reading it, except maybe my husband.  And I currently have 17 people following my little blog, which is about 16 more than I expected.  And now I have an award!  Thanks, Jill!

And I'll be working on an Easter order over the next couple of days, so I'll post pictures soon!

Welcome Cookies

This weekend I had an order for a welcome basket for a new tenant in an office building.  So I made a basket with half of the cookies as keys and half as a simplified version of the company's logo.

I didn't take a picture of the basket because I'm truly awful at wrapping things, which is definitely something I need to work on since it's nice to wrap cookies all prettily.  I'm told they liked it though.

(Can you guess the logo?)

Macarons with Espresso Ganache and Raspberry Cream Cheese Filling (Sanity Sunday)

This was my second try at macarons, and it went so much more smoothly!  I chose to make the basic macaron again, and I made two fillings, espresso ganache and raspberry cream cheese.  This ganache recipe made a much thicker, more substantial filling, so I didn't have the problem I had last time.  And the new food processor made grinding the almonds so much easier!  (On a side note, I LOVE my new food processor!  It works a thousand times better than my old one.  I need to find more things I can process now...)    Anyway, the macarons turned out exactly as I'd hoped.  None of them cracked (I had a few do that last time), and they all formed perfect and even little feet.  And they're so pretty! 

Perfect, right?  I'm so proud of myself!  (FYI, there are dark specks on the macarons because I used some almond meal I bought before I got the new food processor, and they apparently leave the skins on the almonds before they grind them.)