WHITE BUTTERFLIES

When Jill went home after we decorated butterflies on Mother's Day I still had cookies to decorate and no time to do it. I tossed out all of the colored icing we had used to make butterflies but still had some uncolored (white) icing in the refrigerator. I think I was grumbling about mixing up colors when Jill suggested I make white butterflies and I decided that was a very good idea. Mixing the colors and getting the consistency right to ice cookies is not my favorite part. Jill wanted me to make butterflies that look like the white-on-white ginger snowflakes I make every Christmas. Those are easy and very pretty I think.

I tried decorating the big fancy butterfly we hadn't attempted and although I think it has the potential for being truly beautiful I can't control the piping on a cookie that big. I'd better stick to smaller ones. I like the way the shape of the wings on this smaller one turned out.

I think white butterfly cookies would be a pretty favor for a June wedding!

- posted by Momsu

HAPPY FACE FLOWER COOKIES



 Nina made such cute cookies for me for Mother's Day!

 They reminded me of the Ricky Ticky Stickies of the 60s.

We used big pink and orange ones to decorate Nina and Jill's room when they were little.

The cookies are rolled oatmeal so they are a little ragged around the egdes. (It's not a bad PhotoShop job!) They are very good! I love oatmeal cookies! 

There was a whole tray of them - all packaged up so they wouldn't break and shipped to me in San Diego. Thank you, Nina!

PS - Visit Nina's Cookie Shop on line.

- posted by Momsu

MORE BUTTERFLIES

Jill came for Mother's Day weekend and we decorated butterfly cookies. It's MUCH more fun to do it together. She brought a beautiful big copper butterfly cutter and I made ginger and sugar cookies with it and my big Nut Tree butterfly cutter - determined to do a better job with a large cookie this time but didn't get that far.

I also made smaller butterflies with my simple Wilton cutter

and a new swallowtail cutter that quickly became our favorite. Jill put dots on the tails - I like that.

The bigger cookies are still sitting there getting stale a week later. 

What I learned: Make the butterfly body first - it's hard to fit a body between two wings which sometimes end up too far apart. And - it's hard to decorate cookies when it's very hot and dry. 

- posted by Momsu

Nina says: These are so pretty! I wish I had been there to decorate with you. I love the new swallowtail cookie cutter!

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 . . .  

BUTTERFLIES by Nina

 

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

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

I made a few with multicolored outlines.

And a couple with black outlines.

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.

Some butterflies and flowers for a spring birthday.

Happy Spring!

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

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