Peek-A-Boo Rainbow Shamrock Cookies

Do you all ever have one of those ideas that seems so perfect in your head? You get it all laid out in your mind and you think, “Voila! That’s it! Perfection.” Maybe you do, but then again, maybe it’s just me. Anyway, this tutorial was one of those ideas that later didn’t turn out at ALL how I had imagined it. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to make these cookies twice! It was just one of those days… icings weren’t flooding right, colors weren’t looking right, and shapes just looked… wonky. (It’s a word… look it up )

So anyway, the tutorial you see here is the second shot at these little buggers, and I think the second time around they turned out pretty well. In the spirit of always finding gold in a pot at the end of the rainbow, here is a shamrock tribute to the rainbow- Peek-A-Boo style!

To complete these cookies you will need:
• A square cookie cutter
• A shamrock cookie cutter (smaller than the square)
• 10 second icing in: Blue, Green, Yelllow, Orange, and Red
• #2, icing tips (one for each color, or you can keep washing it out)
• white non-pareils

The first step is always to cut out your dough. Roll out your cookie dough on a flowered surface and then use a square cookie cutter.

Now here’s a trick I figured out through the process: Place the cut out square on your cookie sheet and then proceed to the following step. It makes the transfer much easier and you run less of a risk of warping the shape of the cookie. Once you’ve done that, you’ll use another cookie cutter in the shape of a shamrock and lay it on top of the square cookie. Eyeball it to make sure it’s pretty center. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Bake your cookies and they should look something like this:

Next is time for the stripes. I just eyeballed by distance between the stripes, but you can always use a food writer marker to make hash marks on the cookie to properly space your stripes so that they end up straight and even and not…well…wonky! If you need to make hash marks, it would look a little something like this:

Make your stripes. Alternate your icing colors so that they aren’t touching. I.E. do blue, space, yellow, space, and red. Then let it sit for oh… a while (like a ½ hour). The longer you wait the less chance you have of the colors bleeding, which is a good great thing. Make a metal note: Green is a pretty common culprit of something as terrible as bleeding into poor little yellow.

Then go back in and fill in your remaining colors.

There you have it! You’re done with the Peek-A-Boo Shamrock Rainbows!

Now, if you are an overachiever (or just crazy like me), you would have gone ahead and baked the shamrock shaped “negative” space from your cookie dough. I then made little shamrocks decorated with white nonpareils just for fun.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial- Enjoy your St Patrick’s Day!

Tags: holiday, rainbow cookies, rainbows, Shamrocks, St Patricks Day cookies, sugar cookies

Spring Bird Cookies {A Tutorial}

I love spring. Like, REALLY love it. There is something about finally being able to open the doors and windows and take a deep breath without it stinging my lungs that I just adore. The smell of rain, fresh cut grass, budding flowers, and birds chirping. Oh, and speaking of birds chirping and flowers blooming, I have some fun cookies to share, along with how I made them!

To start out, you’ll need to bake up a few round sugar cookies of your choice. Let cool and then get to it!

Outline the cookie in teal royal icing. For these cookies, I used Wilton food coloring found here. After outlining, flood with 10 second icing.

Give the cookie a quick shake back and forth across the table to get the icing to smooth out. Then let it set aside to dry completely for oh… 8 hours or more. I usually let mine sit until the next day because the next step is going to be applying pressure with the food writer and stencil.

I created a stencil out of card stock paper, but you can use whatever works for you. If you have a paisley cookie cutter it may work just fine too. Trace around the stencil with a red food writer.

After outlining with the food writer, use your red royal icing to outline and flood the bird’s body shape.

Once you’ve let the red dry for a while (probably only an hour this time around) you can use a toothpick or a #1 tip to apply the black royal icing for the birds eyes.

Using the same method, apply a small triangle with yellow royal icing immediately after you apply the black eyes.

I used the same toothpick that I used for the eyeballs to add little feet to the bottom of each bird.

Add a little swirl to the red part of the bird to give him the appearance of a wing.  I used ribbon roses glued down with a drop of the red royal icing. There is a great ribbon rose tutorial by Sweet Sugar Belle here, but I prefer to make mine out of rolled buttercream fondant. I then use leaf tip #67 to add three dollops of green icing for leaves.

Finally, I ran a line of red dots around the outside edge of the cookies to finish it off!

Welcome soon to be Spring! I’m SO glad you are here!

Tags: bird cookies, Cookies, fondant roses, ribbon roses, rose cookies, spring cookies

Shamrock Cookies

Now that we’ve made it through Valentine’s Day, guess what? You guessed it! It’s time to gear up for the next holiday, St Patrick’s Day. First, let me just say, I really love classy cookies. Simple, yet beautiful. I wanted to create something sort of like that (or as classy as I can be) for St. Patty’s day. Here is what I came up with….

Fun huh? Maybe it’s classy, maybe it’s not, but I had a lot of fun making them and they were actually amazingly simple to do.

To create these little guys, I used my “dogwood” flower cutter from my Wilton flower making kit. They are basically four-leaf clovers without the stem. Since I wanted to create my own unique stem style anyway, it was really what I was looking for. You could also create a stencil, or use a clover cookie cutter.

I just flooded the cookie in white, waited for it to try a few hours, traced the dogwood with a food writer marker, and then piped my own little curly designs inside. 

Afterwards I just piped some green dots around the edge and voila!

Happy soon to be St. Patrick’s Day!

Tags: Four Leaf Clovers, Shamrock Cookies, Shamrocks, St Patrick's Day, sugar cookies

Valentine’s Petit Fours {A Tutorial}

Valentine’s day isn’t over around here! I recently had the opportunity to make an order of petit fours for a special Valentine’s surprise from a wife to her husband, who happens to be a fan of petit fours. Go figure right? Men can be surprising.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to try my first tutorial! So… here it goes.

Of course the first step is to prepare your cake batter. If you’re not much of a “from scratch” cake baker, no worries, you can always use a box mix! For some projects, box cake doesn’t work well because of its light and airy consistency, but since we’re going to be freezing the cake, the texture of a box mix cake doesn’t make too much of a difference. Side note: when I first started baking, sometimes I would use an “altered” box mix in a pinch. Add strawberries, and lemon juice, or some peaches, (you get the picture) and adjust the liquids from there. Creates a totally new flavor without worrying about trying a whole new recipe! But anyway, I digress…

Next, pour your batter into your prepared cake pan. I always make sure to use parchment paper on the bottom to make the rest of the project (and my life!) easier. Now, this is where your batter matters. Know your recipe to know how “full” to make your pan.

After the cake has baked and cooled, stick it (still in the pan) into the freezer for about… 15 minutes or so (very scientific I know). Once you take it out, it will be ready to “pop” out of the pan onto a cutting board or a cooling rack (my preference). Use something you’ll be able to put back in the freezer after you’ve cut your cake pieces though.

Then use a ruler to cut each piece of cake the same size. I generally use an 8×11 inch cake pan and then use the ruler every 2 inches. I just line the ruler up and slide the knife along the side. I end up with an inch of extra cake on one side, but it’s easier that way then trying to do all that math!

Once finished cutting the 2 inch squares, I take the knife and slice each one in half across the middle to make room for the filling. You could tort the cake before you cut all the little pieces, but that would be too easy.

Next, I squeezed a dollop of homemade strawberry filling onto the bottom half of each petit four and stacked the top back on. Then place them back on the cooling rack and back into the freezer while you get prepared.

Now comes the fun part! I chose to cover my petit fours in butter cream fondant because well.. because I did. You could easily elect to cover them in poured candy melts, pourable fondant, etc. Rolled fondant just works for me. The recipe is butter cream like, so it tastes much better than traditional fondant or anything you’d buy at the store. If you are interested in the poured method, there is a great tutorial HERE.

Gather up a ball of whatever color of fondant you are wanting to use. I did white, red, and pink for my final product. Using the 2 inch size method, it takes approximately a bouncy ball sized amount of fondant for each petit four (there I go getting all scientific again!)

Next you’ll roll it out and cover one square at a time. Fondant takes some practice and… finesse, so don’t get discouraged and keeping playing with it. You may want to make a bit extra if it’s your first time to account for a whoops or two.

After you manage to get the petit four covered in fondant, decorate to your hearts desire! I did a combination of fondant roses, fondant hearts, and the word LOVE. All pictured below.

Fondant Roses

If you’re interested in learing how to make a fondant rose, there is a tutorial HERE.

I just used a clover flower cutter (from a Wilton flower making kit) but you could also use a small heart cutter if you like for the white hearts. I put a dollop of royal icing onto the petit four to act as glue for the fondant heart.

I’m using a #2 Wilton tip for all of the piping. You can use whatever size you are comfortable with!

These were so much fun to create. The possibilities are endless!

If you give this a try, comment here with a link for me to see how yours turned out!

Happy Baking!

Tags: fondant roses, petit fours, tutorial, Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Cookie Bouquet

Valentine’s day is fast approaching, and so to commemorate the occasion, I had to create some special Valentine’s day treats! I’ve been wanting to do a Valentine’s cookie bouquet for quite some time and just haven’t been able to find the time. While I didn’t get this one done in time to create a flyer for Valentine’s Day present ideas, I still thought it turned out quite well and will be more than ready for next year!

A combination of X’s and O’s and hearts seemed the perfect match to me. 

This will be the perfect thing for me to add to my display as the the business of the month at the bank this month!

For some reason I always struggle with creative ideas for how to decorate XOXO cookies. There must be some subliminal mind block against hugs and kisses in my brain… Nah… that’s not it! Anyway, I went with the outlining approach. I’ll try to branch out more next time!

The heart cookies were the most fun because I got to experiment with a new technique that I learned from Sweet Sugar Belle! Adding lace to the cookies was as easy as she described it to be and I really enjoyed it. I’ll most definitely be using this technique on future projects!

I really enjoyed making these. I hope you enjoyed checking them out!

Tags: cookie bouquet, Cookies, heart cookies, hugs and kisses, sugar cookies, valentine s day, XOXO cookies

Halloween Cookies

Well, it’s better late than never to post Halloween cookies. Almost late that is.  I made these last week actually to practice a new lettering technique i’ve been envisioning. I love the way they turned out and had a blast making them.

Halloween cookies are a blast because there are so many possibilities. But these were really fun. I spelled out anything I thought of that reminded me of Halloween.

First, I of course baked the cookies in the pumpkin shape of my choice, and then outlined and flooded them with my favorite shade of orange. Let those sit for 24 hours and then I used my edible marker to hand write the word I wanted on that cookie. A stencil didn’t seem completely practical here because of all the small detail work, like in the word halloween. I’m sure a projector would come in handy here!

After handwriting the word in edible marker, I just piped over the top of those lines with a #2 piping tip. It was surprisingly easy to do.

As with every single treat I make, I had a blast with these and can’t wait to try them with other shapes and themes. Thanksgiving and christmas are coming up quick… what can I come up with? Hmmm….

Happy Halloween!!!!

Polka Dot Number “1″ Cookies

Turning one is a very special event in my book. Afterall, it marks your first successful completion of many eventful things in your life. I mean… being born for one. Although I don’t remember the experience persay, I would be willing to put money on the fact that it was eventful for me at the time. So many exciting and wonderful things happen within your first year of life, why not celebrate its completion with a bang?

When Tiffany asked me to make some sugar cookies for her daughter’s birthday party, I was really excited for multiple reasons. One, because it was an excuse to make cookies (duh!), and two, because I got to make a new cookie cutter! I’ve made quite a few at this point, but any new fun and challenging shapes are welcome. So doing a “number one” shaped cutter was certainly going to be fun.

In case your not picturing the cookie cutter i’m talking about, here’s an example:

It’s nothing special, but if you’ve ever made cookie cutters, you know they can be a bit tricky, and bending the shapes can get time consuming. This one however, turns out, was quite easy. I was really pleased.  Anyway… I digress. you want to see the cookies right?

Tada! The birthday party was purple and orange, and lime green if you can’t tell. So Tiffany just wanted one shaped cookies with those colors mixed in in a polka dot theme, which happens to be my favorite design, so I was naturally happy to oblige.

(Sorry for the fuzziness on this one… I’m still working on my photo taking and editing skills)

Well anyway, they were a lot of dun to make and I enjoyed myself quite a bit.

Thanks for the order Tiffany!