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

HAPPY EASTER from Jill

Happy Easter from Jill! 

I traveled down to be with Mom and Dad on Easter and we decorated cookies today, great fun!

More to come!

Momsu says: This bunny looks like he's made out of china. Great job with the cookies this Easter, Jill!

EASTER COOKIES by Nina

 
Mini Chocolate Flower Cookies

Chocolate Easter Egg Cookies

Sugar Easter Egg Cookies

Sugar Chick Cookies

A collection of Easter Sugar Cookies!

Visit Nina's Show & Tell to see more Easter Egg Cookies, Easter Bunny Cookies, and Spring Flower Cookies.

RABBITS, RABBITS AND MORE RABBITS!

We have had pet rabbits. The first was an Easter bunny for the family that we named Snoopy - because he liked to sit on top of his house. Later Jill had rabbits - an unfriendly dwarf named Br'er Rabbit (fondly called "mean little ____") and then she had two lops. The first was Eeyore (Winnie the Pooh of course) and the next was Buckthorn (from Watership Down). They were wonderful pets - we all loved them! Now I have two garden rabbits made out of plaster and a couple of stuffed rabbit dolls that Nina made a long time ago for Easter, some rabbits for Easter decor AND we have wild rabbits enjoying the lawn in front of our house! They are very cute and impossible to discourage! We live with an imperfect lawn!

Rabbit cookies are low maintenance and fun to make! 

At the top of this post is Ann Clark's wonderful shape. Above a rabbit both Nina and I made last year - over a thousand miles apart they came out looking identical.

NINA SAYS: I just love those little white sprinkles for the tail, so much that I used them again this year.

Nina added colorful bows this year - and

she made chocolate sitting bunnies. Good job - I like the colors, Nina!

NINA SAYS: Thanks, Momsu! I was happy with the colors, too.

- posted by Momsu