Beach Ball Cookies are fun and just in time for summer. It’s supposed to finally be warm and sunny here in the coming weeks and so these are just what the doctor ordered.
These could be great in so many different colors!
I hope to have a post soon with a tutorial. Enjoy your summer!
I did a little creative baking recently by expirimenting with some different pumpkin recipes, because, well, I love all things pumpkin and I don’t care who knows it.
I tried a fun little recipe called Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins. I figured, how can I go wrong? Pumpkin? Good. Cream Cheese? Good. My husband tells me that I could find a way to put it in anything anyway. Muffins? Well that’s just cake without frosting. Good. Here are the results…
They turned out really well. Moist, pumpkin-y (yes a word) and a lovely bit of sweet cream cheese surprise inside. Yum. In case anyone is interested, the recipe is as follows:
For the muffins:
4 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
5 tablespoons white sugar
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons chopped pecans
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups canned pumpkin
1/3 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
For the Cream Cheese Filling:
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons brown sugar
Directions:
ENJOY!
I seem to have taken an unusually long break between Polka Dot Affair Part 1 and Polka Dot Affair Part 2, but at any rate, here is the second half. For the same event, I was able to make polka dot #1 cookies for a first birthday party as well as a matching polka dot birthday cake for the little guy.
These cookies were a lot of fun because I used fondant icing instead of my traditional royal icing. Fondant is a beast in itself, but once you get the hang of handling it, you can run with it.
I rolled the fondant out flat, then lifted it and laid it over the cookie and then used the same #1 cookie cutter that I used to create the cookie to cut out the #1 shape on top of the cookie. Don’t worry about it being too large, the cookie expands a bit when it’s baking so there will be enough of an “edge” around the fondant.
The cake was a lot of fun too. It was a bit different to work with because this particular cake is gluten-free (for the allergy of the little guy) but turned out pretty great. I think his mom ended up eating more of the cake than the birthday boy!
I was recently asked to create some splendid treats for a polka dot themed birthday party for a very special little boy in my life. I of course, being myself, went overboard. But hey, it’s what I do. Especially when there are polka dots involved, because as anyone who knows me can tell you, I am obsessed with polka dots.
I’ll start out the little polka dot adventure with my polka dot petit fours.
I love these little cakes. I traditionally make my petit fours with pound cake as it’s a nice heavy cake that is easily carved and doesn’t have as many crumbs.
Plus, using a really dense cake allows for the poured fondant to more easily cover them with only one coat. I prefer to use poured fondant on petit fours as opposed to rolled fondant as it’s not as thick of a coating and you get a better cake to icing ratio. Oh yes, petit fours are that official.
Petit fours are almost as much fun to eat as they are to make. Or maybe they are almost as much fun to make as they are to eat. I dunno, they’re fun either way!
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!
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!
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!
