Tuesday, April 30, 2013

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GINGER COOKIE


When I realized THE GINGER COOKIE would be a year old in April I thought we should celebrate - with ginger cookies of course! The year has gone by very fast and we have learned so much. Our thanks to the many cookie bloggers with their good ideas, tips and tutorials - you are an inspiration to us. Our goal is to share what we do and have fun along the way. No pressure! Right?

In our family we celebrate birthdays with cupcakes. We started out with decorated cakes but as everyone grew older cupcakes became more popular with us - and this long before their recent popularity.  I remembered I have a cupcake cookie cutter with a candle on top and I thought it would be perfect for birthday number one!

 
But - April is almost over and I don’t have time to bake and decorate cookies before the end of the month! And so I scanned the cupcake cookie cutter (say that five times fast!) and decorated it on the computer. See my butterfly post.

The great thing about decorating cookies on a computer is it’s so easy to change the design -
ADD MORE POLKA DOTS?
try something different -
 
TAKE AWAY SOME POLKA DOTS!
 have too many ideas and 
HOW ABOUT STRIPES ON THE CUPCAKE? 

get lost in what you’re doing.

DO SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!

It always seems to take longer than you thought it would - but it’s so fun! There is one problem! You can't eat an image . . . 

- posted by Momsu


Don't miss Nina's wonderful butterflies on the last post . . .  



Sunday, April 28, 2013

BUTTERFLIES by Nina

 Butterfly Cookie by The Ginger Cookie
I was inspired by Momsu's butterfly cookie post and decorated some butterflies, too.

Butterfly Cookie by The Ginger Cookie
I made this one last year but wanted to use more color and Momsu's technique of outlining the wings first.

Butterfly Cookies by The Ginger Cookie
I made a few with multicolored outlines.

Butterfly Cookies by The Ginger Cookie
And a couple with black outlines.

Butterfly Cookie by The Ginger Cookie

Butterfly Cookies by The Ginger Cookie
I also made these small, simple butterfly cookies but the detail gets lost on the ginger cookie background. I might try these again on a sugar cookie, maybe with a little bit of embellishment on the wings.

Butterfly & Flower Cookies by The Ginger Cookie
Some butterflies and flowers for a spring birthday.

Happy Spring!

Saturday, April 13, 2013

A BUTTERFLY

A butterfly is so fragile and beautiful - I think it's hard to translate one into a cookie. If you research butterflies the design possibilities are endless. I have a big butterfly in my Nut Tree cookie cutter collection that I've tried in the past to make into a cookie but haven't been happy with the way it turned out. Last year I found a smaller butterfly cutter and tried again with better results.

I did a scan of the cutter


 and removed the background in Photoshop.


Then I filled the shape with gingerbread brown using the draw tools in MS Publisher. There are many more sophisticated programs you can use to do this but I've been using Publisher for so long it's easier and faster for me.


I decorated the shape using the draw and color tools thinking in terms of what I could do with frosting.


And finally I decorated the cookie. It's fun and sometimes it translates well and sometimes it doesn't. There are usually some changes to the final design.
I like to keep my cookies simple - not too much going on. If you decorate on wet icing it helps to keep the look fragile. I waited too long to make the final dots and they didn't smooth out. 

Soon I'll try Butterflies again.

- posted by Momsu

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

UH OH!



Did you get an email from The Ginger Cookie talking about orange trees last week? If so it wasn't supposed to happen. The post was from last November - which somehow wound up back in the drafts. What's going on here? I put it back where it belongs in the November posts and Blogger let everyone on my email list know about it. Perhaps I don't know what I'm doing? Sorry for the confusion . . .

- posted by Momsu