LIGHT BULBS, PACKAGES AND SNOWFLAKES

I love Nina's Christmas cookies this year! Her colors are wonderful - red and green of course, add white and blue and then add yellow and pink? It works! 

Old fashioned big colored lights are back.  

Bright colored packages tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things. And this is my favorite cookie! Nina added half of a flower cookie to a square and here it is - very cute! 

Circular snowflakes round out the trio - cool in icy blue and white.  

YUM - these look good enough to eat! Will you bring us some Nina?

- posted by Momsu

MERRY CHRISTMAS COOKIES by Nina

Out of the archives come some Christmas cookies never posted. 

Ginger Snowmen

Sugar Candy Canes

Chocolate Trees

 Sugar Santa Claus

Merry Christmas from The Ginger Cookie!

DOGS at WOODS

Jill volunteers for Woods Humane Society in San Luis Obispo on the Central Coast of California. December 7 was their Open House. Jill makes dog cookies for the event every year. Real live dogs dress up and come with their people to have their pictures taken with Santa. 

Black Horse Espresso and Bakery provides more delectable treats baked by pastry chef Matthew Mimmack and a good time is had by all. 

- posted by Momsu

DON'T SIT UNDER THE APPLE TREE WITH ANYONE ELSE BUT ME

I created this apple tree before I had a blog. Inspired by Sugarbelle (who does a wonderful job of combining cookie cutters and making cookie cutters into entirely different things) I pieced two cutters together and created a fat little tree. If you look closely you will see a big scalloped cookie cutter and a small square one. I love the shape it created.

The cookies came out well but I tried a different ginger cookie recipe and was very disappointed with the flavor. It wasn't as good as our recipe and I threw the cookies out - didn't waste my time decorating them. Nothing ventured . . .

To figure out this tree I scanned the cookie cutters and removed the background in PhotoShop. Then I pieced the two outlines together and filled them with gingerbread color.



I planned to decorate them like this - I used MSDraw to draw on the scanned cookie to make a green tree with red apples. I do this with anything I want to experiment with - to see what it will look like. It's fun! 

Smaller trees are easier to make! 

Last year I posted AN APPLE FOR THE TEACHER so I wanted a different apple cookie cutter and found this smaller one from Wilton - available on Amazon for $4.32 (yikes!) or from JOANN online for 99 cents. I ordered it from JOANN along with a few other things to defer the cost - and I had a coupon!

I've finally learned to put lots of flour in tight spots in cookie cutters (like the stem and leaf) so they will come out of the cutter without breaking off. 

Enjoy apple season! 

- posted by Momsu

TRICK OR TREAT

It isn't Halloween without some sort of pumpkin cookie! This year when I was running out of orange icing from a lot of pumpkins and HOPED I wouldn't run out of the icing before I iced one last one, I tried something new. I drew a face on a cookie with edible pen and colored in the features with the pen.Then I piped around the features and filled in the pumpkin with flood icing. Very simple and easy - and I didn't run out of icing!  

Someday I'll do a post about this guy - he was going to be decorated as a Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) cookie but this is as far as I got this year. I used the same technique as on the pumpkin above but this time I used a template to trace the face on a lot of cookies with a food marker. Then I filled in the features using a small paint brush and food color thinned with vodka and iced around them. I thought it worked very well! He and his friends are resting in peace in the freezer until they are decorated in the future.

Not very scary but plenty nostalgic. The cutter for this little ghost cookie came from Hallmark (I think) at least 40 years ago when I was making costumes for my little children and life was hectic and wonderfully fun! I made dozens of these to go to school parties every year, glazed (we didn't know about Royal Icing yet) and with currents for eyes. 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 

- posted by Momsu 

AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

Fall is apple time - available in markets all year long they are never better than fresh off the tree. My family's favorite pie is apple - YUM! Apples come in all different colors and are a good shape for a cookie too!

A shiny red apple is best of all!

I looked up familiar apple sayings - they're fun:

* You are the apple of my eye.
* An apple for the teacher.
* Don't upset the apple cart.
* An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
* As American as apple pie.
* An apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
* Applesauce!
* How do you like them apples?
* The Big Apple
* Rotten to the core.
* Apple polisher.
* Don't let one rotten apple spoil the whole barrel.
* You're a good apple.
* Apple pie, motherhood, and the American flag.

-posted by Momsu

GO FISH

In May I got a little over ambitious and made way too many cookies! I made butterflies, flowers, snails and fish - and except for a few butterflies most of them ended up in the freezer. 

I had forgotten about everything except the fish and so when I got them out to decorate there were only a dozen fish and lots and LOTS of snails, flowers and butterflies which I was NOT in the mood to play with! More about them in a later post . . .  

The fish were fun. I made eyes on wax paper first - dozens of fish eyes. I tried using an edible marker for the black dot but it didn't give as perfect a shape as icing did - not too thick or it will form a point. On some I took the point off by lightly pressing down on the top with a small spatula while the dot was still fresh. By making your own eyes and not putting the dot in the middle you can give whatever you are using them on expression.

This little fish had a bad eye which I pried off after it had dried. Royal icing makes very good glue - it was really STUCK on there! To salvage the cookie I put a big blob of icing over the hole that was left and pressed the new eye down. I wish I had thought to do this earlier! I like the way it looks.

Visit Nina's Cookie Shop to see her wonderful Christmas fish near the bottom of her Christmas Cookie post.  

- posted by Momsu