Behind the Scenes

I gotta tell you, I am having so much fun with this bakery business! Every new cookie or cake brings a new challenge or a new technique. I've had a few people ask about the ingredients of my sugar cookies and how to get the shapes nice and crisp, so that they don't spread out as they bake. While I'm working on a "pastel de cumpleaños" for a very special little 1-year-old, I figured I would give you a sneak peek at the process for making the cookie dough I use.

Yep, here it is - the recipe for my sugar cookies! I didn't come up with it myself (definitely borrowed it off of a website) so I don't feel any special claim to it. The only deviation that I usually take from this recipe is to cream the butter and sugar for less than 5 minutes. I've gotten to the point where I can kind of tell when it's ready... sometimes that takes 5 minutes, but often less.

Here's all the "scratch." This was before I got my nice pretty flour and sugar containers :P

And here's my girl... my KitchenAid mixer. I love this thing. It's definitely the best-cared-for item in our kitchen. Since I'm a Doctor Who fan, I've been meaning to get a Tardis-themed decal for it from Etsy... but I digress.

The kiddo likes to help Mama with the cookies!

I love using my clear plastic splash guard/funnel thing (technical term!) on my KitchenAid mixer when spooning in the dry ingredients. Otherwise, my kitchen would look like there was a recent snowfall of flour.

This recipe typically makes about 3 dozen medium-sized cookies, so I usually split the dough into three mounds and wrap them separately in plastic wrap. After that, they either go in the fridge or the freezer. If I'm going to use the dough that day, I let them chill in the fridge for about an hour and a half. If I'll use it in the next several days, it can hang out in the fridge (out of the way of little toddler hands, of course). Any longer than that and it can hibernate in the freezer for up to three months (I'm pretty sure it would be good for up to six months in the freezer, but I don't think I could bring myself to wait that long to make a batch of cookies!)

And that about it, folks. Perhaps if there's interest, I'll also share my recipe and process for royal icing, but at the moment I smell a wonderful Gibberish Cake ready to come out of the oven. I'm about to have a very happy husband!

See you later!

Brush Embroidery Flowers

At the same time as I was decorating the ice cream cookies, these beautiful flower cookies were baking in the oven. This is one of the largest batches of cookies I've made, which (at the moment) is really my absolute maximum - 50 cookies. When it takes 10 minutes to bake a sheet, and you can only fit 5-6 cookies on a sheet at a time, and you have a toddler crawling around underneath you... it tends to take a while. However, once they were baked and I was able to start decorating, I had the BEST time working on some more brush embroidery! I hoped that I'd get another opportunity to practice this technique :)

The technique involves piping a squiggly line, then using a squared-off brush to drag some of the icing down and away. In this situation, the icing dries very quickly, so you can't take too long to use your brush. Below, you can see a flower with just the purple icing before I've done the brush embroidery.

Here are all 50 cookies... whew! Some of them are a slightly different shade of purple, because I made a second batch of purple icing and only had a tiny drop of blue left, so they're more of a pink-shaded purple.

Ice Cream Cookies

What a busy weekend! While we were getting ready to go on our first vacation with our toddler, I was working on a couple of different, fun cookie orders. These ice cream themed cookies are for a first birthday party this coming weekend - don't they look cute with the sprinkles?

Vineyard Vines

Preppy in pink :)

Peter Rabbit cookies and cupcakes

These cupcakes and cookies were for a Peter Rabbit themed baby shower! The chocolate cupcakes were topped with chocolate buttercream frosting and some Oreo "dirt," and the carrot on top is a chocolate-covered strawberry.

It looks like a real miniature garden! Getting the orange chocolate onto the strawberries was a headache, though. I was struggling to get the chocolate thin enough without burning it, and it ended up being too thick and lumpy. I've realized that I definitely need to use paramount crystals to thin out the chocolate before dipping. I had the same issue when I was practicing with cake pops - the chocolate coating would be thick and uneven. I just ordered a tub of paramount crystals online, so I'm looking forward to trying again when it arrives!

I am so glad that I practiced painting the Peter Rabbit cookies earlier. This time, I also made some carrot-shaped cookies as well. I used a different piping tip to make the leaves on top.

In some ways, the food coloring is challenging to work with - a tiny bit more or less food coloring on your brush can definitely change the intensity of the color. It's also hard to mix different shades. However, there's no special equipment that you need other than a tiny paintbrush and some water for cleaning your brush. It's also a tiny amount of food coloring that you're using.

Georgia On My Mind

Now all I have to do is figure out how to make peach-flavored sugar cookies :D