Lavender Cookies

These lavender cookies are a design that I make over and over again because they come together quickly and although the design is simple, it's a standout.

To make them, you need just three colors of royal icing and absolutely no artistic ability. If you can pipe a line and a dot, you can make these. You also don't need a special cookie cutter...round, square, rectangle, any shape will do.  I used a plaque shaped cutter for these.

These lavender cookies are for my sweet friends at The Wednesday Community Meal. I miss them so much.

Basecoat some cookies with white royal icing and let them dry completely before moving onto the next step. 

With piping consistency green royal icing, pipe some stems and add a few "v's" to them. 

Using lavender piping consistency icing, pipe groups of dots above each of the "v's."

For a final touch,  pipe a few green lines at the base of the stems. 

Please Stay With Me

I apologize for my extended blogging and baking break, but I do have a good excuse.

You see, I am moving to West Cornwall, Connecticut in mid-June to run a retreat center alongside my husband for Trinity Church Wall Street. The last few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life, preparing for our move across the country and putting our house on the market.

With potential buyers coming in, we need to keep the house clean and tidy. Cookie decorating is so much fun but it is unfortunately sort of messy.  I can't have sheet pans filled with cookies setting out all over the counters.

I promise though there will be baking in my future and I am looking forward to sharing my new adventures with you. Just know that I haven't forgotten you and I sincerely hope that you stay with me.

Whale Cookies

I created these whale cookies for a dear friend's baby shower.

When I first started planning and sketching out the design, I went a little too crazy with the details — adding a pectoral fin, blowhole and eyelashes. I wasn't pleased and decided to pull back and simplify, which I find in most cases, is always best.

The cleaner design made the whales look sweeter, cuter and just what I wanted for a baby shower.

Taking the time to sketch your designs first really pays off. It's much better to test your designs on paper instead of on a cookie!

Here's how I made them:

Bake some whale cookies.

Use an edible ink marker to trace an outline for the belly of the whale. To keep it consistent on all of the cookies,  you may want to make a paper template that you can trace.

Mix up some flood consistency blue icing, white icing and a small amount of black icing. This is wet-on-wet decorating so you need to have all your icings mixed before you start.

Outline and fill in the belly of the whale using a pastry bag fitted with a #2 tip.

With a #2 tip, outline the rest of the whale in blue.

Fill it in with the blue icing and use a scribe tool or skewer to help evenly distribute it.

Drop on a dot of black for the eye.

Add a drop of white icing inside the black.

Let the whales dry for at least 30 minutes before proceeding to the next step.

Add some lines of white icing to the belly.

Add some lines of blue icing to the tail.

All done! Let the cookies dry completely before serving or packaging.

Gold Valentine's Day Cookies

This year's Valentine's Treat Sale to benefit Food Ministries at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral is quickly approaching, so I have been very busy this week trying my best to make treats that are as beautiful as they are delicious. I have even been adding a touch of gold to some of them.

The easiest way to add gold is to make a paint by mixing a bit of edible gold luster dust with a few drops of volka. Then all you have to do is paint it onto completely dry royal icing.

From experience, I've learned that it pays to buy good quality luster dusts. Inexpensive ones don't dissolve very well and tend to look grainy and clumpy on the cookies. I think Crystal Colors makes the best ones and they can be purchased online. I ordered the Gold Blush color I used for these from Global Sugar Art.

My favorite luster dust.

Painting the gold onto a brushed embroidery cookie. It's important that the royal icing be completely dry before you add the gold.

Here are a few more photos of the gold cookies that will be fore sale on Sunday, Feb. 14,  from 9 a.m. to noon at the Cathedral in Kempton Hall. Come early for the best selection because we do sell out. I hope to see you there.

Baby Shower Animal Cookies

My sweet friend Ginny is so trusting.

She asked me to make decorated sugar cookies for a family baby shower and when I asked her what design she would like, she responded, "The artist you are will produce fabulous results, I’ll leave it to you. " I really wanted to reward her faith in me with some extra special cookies.

Well thanks to my daughter Una, I knew exactly what I would make for my friend.

You see, Una had just attended a white elephant party and came home with a new set of Martha Stewart Noah's Ark Copper Cookie Cutters.

"I chose these just for you," she said when she presented me with the big beautiful set. I couldn't believe it, what a wonderful gift and truly proof that one man's trash is another man's treasure.

"Was it a struggle to win them?," I asked her, thinking there was surely a lot of trading and fighting to get them. "No, not really, no one else was that interested," she said.  Boy was I lucky there weren't any cookie decorators at that party! It was kismet and that's how these animal cookies came about and when I presented them to Ginny she was very pleased.

Here's how I made them:

The cutters.

The baked cookies. These are big cookies and it took four batches of dough to get 24 cookies, six of each.

I started by flooding all of the cookies. White for the polar bear.

White for the sheep.

Blue/gray for the elephants. I also flooded the lions with yellow and the kangaroos with brown.

When it came time to flood the giraffes, I used yellow but also had some brown icing ready in a pastry bag fitted with a #1 tip.

After adding the basecoat, I immediately dropped on some dots of brown.

I used a scribe tool to shape them so that they didn't just look like brown dots.  I let all of the cookies dry before moving onto the next step.

With a black edible ink marker, I added face details.

And some toe details too.

For the sheep, I added some wool by piping on swirls of stiff royal icing. I also added a mane and tail to the lions by using stiff orange tinted icing.

After adding some face details with edible markers, I decided the sheep also needed a bit of "wool" on top of their heads.

The elephants got details added with a black edible marker and tusks using the same stiff icing I used for the sheep's wool. I used a brown edible marker to add the horn, hoof and tail details to the giraffes.

The elephant's are my favorite.

Let the cookies dry completely before packaging.

Baby Deer Cookies

These baby deer cookies are the final tutorial from my woodland cookie set.

My friend Cindy warned me that the deer cutter that caught my eye on our field trip to Blake's Decorette Shop might not be the best.

"It looks like it would be hard to get the dough out of those thin legs," she said.

I ignored reason and bought the cutter anyways because it was so darn cute, but Cindy was right. The thin legs were a big pain!

Patience, very cold cookie dough and the use of a small soft paint brush to easy the dough out of the cutter worked but gosh, I'd hate to make more than a dozen of these.

Luckily the decorating went smoothly. Only three colors were needed,  just brown and a small amount of white and black. And, brown was the only color that I needed a piping bag for. I applied the white and black details with a paint brush and scribe tool.

Here's how I made them:

Be patient and cut and bake your cookies. I couldn't have gotten the dough to release without applying some pressure from the brush. As you can see this leaves a few marks on the legs of the deer but these won't be noticeable after decorating.

I outlined and filled the cookie with brown icing using a pastry bag and #2 tip. Then I immediately added some small drops of thinned white icing using a scribe tool. Just touch the icing with the tip of the scribe and then touch it onto the deer's back. I let this dry completely before moving onto the next step.

Using white icing and a small brush add white to the tail, hooves, ears, chest and eye area.

Use the scribe tool to add a black nose, eye, lashes and lines on the bottom of the hooves. While the eye is still wet, use the scribe add the tiniest drop of white.

Jack-o'-lantern Cookies

If you are a beginning cookie decorator looking for a simple design that makes use of multiple decorating techniques, Jack-o'-lantern cookies are for you!

There's some brush work, edible ink work and some segmented piping and it's all basic and easy to do.

To get started, bake mini pumpkin cookies and an equal number of larger base cookies and also have ready a black edible ink marker, a small "food only" brush, a batch of royal icing, gel colorings (I used orange, delphinium blue and moss green) and two pastry bags fitted with #2 tips.


Here's how to decorate them:

Start off by outlining and flooding the base cookies with white royal icing using one the pastry bags and a #2 tip.  Let the base cookies dry completely before moving onto the next step.

Once the base cookies are dry, mix up some blue royal icing and thin it to medium consistency. Drop about a teaspoon full onto the cookie and use your brush to spread it out evenly. It won't look perfectly smooth but that's the point, you want to add a textural look to the cookie.

After you have covered all of the base cookies, set them aside to dry. Reserve any leftover icing to use as "glue" when it's time to stick the cookies together.

Now it's time for the mini pumpkins, mix up a very small amount of medium consistency moss green royal icing.

Paint the stem of all of the pumpkins.

Mix up some medium consistency orange icing and place it a pastry bag fitted with a #2 tip. Following the curves of the cookie add orange to just the center segment. Do this to all of the pumpkins and let them dry for at least 20 minutes.

Add orange to the outside segments. This segmented piping adds so much texture and realism to the pumpkin. Let the icing dry completely before moving onto the next step.

Add a dollop of icing to back of the pumpkins and stick them onto the base cookies.

It will look like this.

Now for the fun part, get out your edible ink marker and turn the pumpkins into Jack-o'-lanterns.

Let the ink and the "cookie glue" dry completely before packaging.