Hippity Hop

Tis the time for all things Spring and Easter. Blogs that I read have shown some beautiful and some really cute cookie ideas over the past couple of days. I decided to try my hand at Easter cookies and thankfully I had a little sugar cookie dough to play around with. I've been wanting to try this one decorating technique in particular. It's called brush embroidery and while it looks hard, it's pretty simple.

You will want your royal icing to be piping consistency. I used a #4 round tip, and wish I had used a smaller one, like a #2. To start, pipe the outer edge of a petal.

Take a small paintbrush, dip it in water and then wipe off the excess. Catch the edge of your line, and drag it down to create the petal. Overlap your next line slightly, and continue to use a wet brush to pull the line down creating petals.

Continue all the way around and then you can even create a smaller one inside to fill your flower.

I finished my design with two smaller flowers and some white non pareils. I will say I will be doing this again as I love the effect, even though I think my icing was a little too thick and my tip a little too big. But I do love how this bunny turn out especially since I was basically playing around.

What's Black and White and Yummy all over?

In the wonderful month of March, both my sister and I celebrate our birthdays. When I asked my sister Jodi what she wanted for her birthday this year, she replied nothing. Shortly after her response, I was shopping and saw exactly what I wanted to get her, or more like make her, for her birthday. Now I swear I meant to take more pictures, but when I was working on these I was also dealing with another cookie order, a child coming home from school with the start of a head cold (that I would later get and still have now) and a dying battery on the camera. So two little pictures is all I have to share today (sorry). First for Jodi's gift, I made some sugar cookies and iced them in royal icing. Then while they icing was still wet...

I topped the cookies with these little cuties! This is what I found shopping that one day that gave me my aha present moment. These are also what I was planning on taking more pictures of, like a picture of the package so you could see all of them. These edible paper decals are by Cake Mate. I picked out the black and white decals because they had two designs with bumble bees. My sister loves bumble bees. The other designs were flowers and circles. I'm telling you, these things couldn't have been any easier. All you really do is pull them off the paper and put the decal on top of wet icing. After that let them dry, and you have a very cool looking cookie that people will wonder "How did they do that?".

Baby, Baby, Baby

My friend Cecilia was hosting a shower for a friend and asked me to make some cookies for the affair. Cecilia was going with a baby elephant theme for the little boy to be, and found some very cute cookies on pinterest. So after finding a elephant cookie cutter at my favorite cake supply store, and tweaking the cutter a bit to make it more cartoonish then realistic, the cookies were made.

I used my basic sugar cookie recipe and then outlined the elephants in blue royal icing.

Once the outline was dried, I used a thinner royal icing to "flood" the inside of the cookie.

I piped an upside down green teardrop for the elephant's ear.

Once again I used the flooding technique to fill in the ear. I also added a black dot for the baby elephant's eye.

After the ear was completely dry, I piped on a simple white royal icing heart to complete the baby elephant.