Red and White Christmas Cookies

I wanted to do some red and white only cookies for the staff at work and this is what I came up with.  Its the first time I've done snowflake cookies and been happy with my decorating results.  :)  I practiced on paper for a bit.  :)

Christmas Gift Boxes

I saw this idea of using clear lid gift boxes on flickr (can't remember which talented person it was).  I love the idea of the cookies being visible and you can create a pretty presentation.  These gift boxes were for friends and family. Can't wait to do some more!

Winter One derland Order

I was busy this week after school with a 1st birthday order.  I made up 6 dozen winter cookies, cupcake pops and a cupcake cake.  I only took pictures of the cookies.  By the time I finished the cupcake pops and cake I was too exhausted to take pictures.  I still haven't completely cleaned up the kitchen either! 

Christmas Card

Merriest Wishes Mint Christmas Card

Make a statement with Shutterfly Christmas photo cards.

View the entire collection of cards.

Shutterfly Cards Rock!

Shutterfly is giving away 50 free cards if I blog about how great there products are!  Well that's easy!  I love Shutterfly products and have ordered many things from them. I've been a fan of Shutterfly products for several years. Last year I was able to order some great Christmas cards with pictures of Kate. They offered such a big variety and I couldn't decide which I liked best so I ordered a few different ones. What made these cards even more special was that they had a Special Olympics design and part of the proceeds benefited them. Most of you know how meaningful the Special Olympics is to Ryan and I, so this little added touch to the card made it that more unique for us. The quality of the cards are always top-notch. They are printed on high quality card stock and image quality is superior. They also offer holiday cards.

Some fun photo options I could use this year

Cards are not the only thing that I've ordered and been happy with. Last year I made some great photobooks and calenders as Christmas gifts. I love all the options and layouts that the photobooks have. They make great keepsakes and I highly recommend making one to preserve some of your favorite pictures. I used to be a scrapbooker, but since discovering Shutterfly I've been making all my photobooks digitally.
This year I'm looking forward to creating some great Christmas cards again and maybe some photo mugs. I noticed the photomugs have multiple photo layout options and different graphic designs now. These will make great gifts too.


So if you need some gift ideas for yourself or someone special check out shutterfly today!

Pie Cookies!

These cookies were inspired from Ali Bee on Flickr.  The moment I saw them I knew I needed to make some!  I even dreamed about how I would make them the night before.  ;)  So cherry, banana cream, pumkin, and chocolate pie cookies were made the very next day.  They were fun to make.  I flavored the icing the appropriatly to match the pie flavor.  So far the chocolate is my favorite. 

Thank You

A Thank You Smile Cookie!  These cookies are two or one!  The smile cookie is placed on top (secured with some royal icing).  The marbleing tie dye effect was fun to do. I hadn't done it before so it was a bit of an experiment. Each little smile took on a character of it's own.  It was almost difficult to eat them (almost).  I hope I have a good reason to make these again.  :)

More Halloween

I spent some time (yeah, probably too much) on some more Halloween Cookies for the weekend.  Here are a few samples.  I made about 4 dozen, these are just a few.  There are so many great ideas for Halloween cookies.  I think next year I will need to start earlier to get all my creative ideas out on the dough.

Horse Clinic Cookies

Some cookies for my sisters horse farm.  They are having a clinic and some fall/horse inspired cookies were just the treat they needed (people, not horses :). 

Gracyn's Spooktacular 6th Birthday

Some Halloween cookie fun! All for my beautiful niece Gracyn! I haven't done Halloween sugar cookies before so I searched flickr for inspiration. I spent a few hours doing sketches and this is the platter I came up with. Lots of Halloween fun!

I just love the little black cookie with googly eyes. 

Little witch girl and a sparkle spider.

Great Halloween faces! Ekk

Frankenstein face between some happy ghosts.

See the little purple dracula face?

Baby Girl Onesie Sugar Cookies

Made these pink cuties for a baby shower!  So girly and pretty!  I just love them. 

Audrey turns 3!

Some special Birthday Cookies for a special Birthday Girl! Inspired by Sugarbelle! I'd been wanting to try some fun girly designs and this was the perfect occasion.  I spent more time on them than I would like to admit, but I'm thrilled with how they turned out. 

The leopard and zebra print was easier to create than I thought.  It was just time consuming waiting for all the different "layers" to dry.

I used a bit of disco dust on the 3!

Happy Birthday Audrey!

Devils Food Cake Cupcakes

Today I experimented with Martha Stewart recipes.  It was fun, but as usual with Martha's recipes it was time consuming and messy.  One batch of cupcakes and I had 3 dirty bowls and a saucepan, and that was just from the batter.  The frosting is a whole other mess of a story.  :)  The recipe is straight from her Cupcakes book.  It is very chocolatey, not too sweet, and produces a somewhat dense cupcake.  I got 3 dozen from the batch, which was more than I bargained for.  For the frosting I decided to try two.  I was in the mood for some cream cheese frosting, and had just enough cream cheese on hand.  I halved the recipe from Martha's book.  Its just a basic cream cheese frosting, nothing you can really mess up or be surprised about.  The other frosting I made the dark chocolate frosting.  It was a trickier recipe with lots of chocolate!  The consistency was a bit too soft for me, so I added more powdered sugar.  This frosting is very rich, and not really sweet since it calls for cocoa powder and non sweetened melted chocolate.  I like it though.  So overall it was a successful baking trial!

I'm trying new decorating ideas.  This is white chocolate piped onto parchment paper and sprinkled with some sanding sugar.  Once it hardens, it's easy to lift and place on top of the cupcake. 

Sprinkle variety. 

YUM!

A Mix of Sweet!

This platter was for a church gathering, so it is a mix of cookies to appeal to everyone's taste buds!  Some shortbread, sugar cookie, chocolate chip and a chocolate mint.  Slightly random, but definetly delicious!

Birthday Niece!

My niece, Annabella, turned one this week!  So some sweet cookies for a super sweet niece were called for.  I'd been wanting to do the ice cream cone cookies for awhile now, and I think they turned out super cute.  Happy Birthday!