My hubby is working with the boy scouts in our area and had a court of honor tonight.  So I made some cookies for him to take.  I was excited when I thought of the gingerbread scout idea.  But I think they look more like Chewbaca from Star Wars than a boy scout.  Either way, they were both yummy :)

LT Promo Cookies

In December my husband advanced to the rank of Lieutenant in the Navy. My girls and I were so proud of him. In the Navy there is a tradition called a "wetting down" where the guy being promoted is supposed to throw a party and buy boos for everyone. However, we don't drink, so we thought we would just invite everyone over to our house for a alcohol-free party after the ceremony. But being December everyone was busy with the holiday rush and we just never could find a good weekend to do the party. Today we are finally doing the party. So I made these cookies for the kids.

It is a collar device. On Camouflage uniforms there are patches on each point of the color. One side has a patch that tells the rank, and the other patch tells what their job is/what they do in the military (builder, pilot, medic, JAG...)

It's been a while since I've made my fancy cookies. So it was fun to pull all my decorating stuff out and take a photo of the final product to add to my cookie sideshow :)

Since we are not paying for a bunch of wine and beer, my husband said he'd cater the dinner, so I don't have to worry about cooking for a ton of people. Instead of focusing on the food I've been busy all week getting the house clean and finally doing all the things I've been ignoring since we moved in like hanging pictures, curtains and moving furniture that just didn't seem to be in the right place. It feels good to look around the house and feel like we are more settled.

Patriots/football cookies

I have to admit that I am not at all interested in football other than if the win or loss has put my husband in a bad mood. But apparently the patriots are getting to be a big deal. Especially around here in patriots country. My husband's boss is having a party tomorrow and I signed up to bring some football cookies. This is what I came up with.

I guess I am getting to be known as the dessert/cookie lady around Sam's office and with the other Navy families we socialize with. I think I like that. Since we move so much it is sort of nice to have a "thing" that makes it easy for people to remember me by.

While making the 2 types of cookies this weekend I realized that though I enjoy the look on people's faces and the comments that they give me with the fancy looking cookies, I'd rather make the simple ones. So my favorite from this batch was the football cookies because they required the least amount of work and look the best.

Oh, and the footballs are supper charged with chocolate. When I was making the frosting I didn't use any food coloring, instead I wanted to color them just with cocoa powder, with that in mind I carelessly put a whole cup of cocoa powder into the batch of frosting. (Darn Costco sized package of cocoa made me loose my perspective.) It took me a wile to get it to be useable. In the end the frosting ended up tasting a lot like fudge. So I think people will like them, but I could probably start with 1/4 of a cup of cocoa next time.

Gifts for Teachers-

Here are the gifts we are handing out to our Teachers this year.

We included 1 candy cane cookie, 2 squares of fudge and 2 sticks of our caramel. My oldest wanted to write notes to go with them. So we cut up some wrapping paper and she wrote on the back of it. She came up with the message herself "I am glad your my teacher." She signed it with a little heart sticker and her name.

Don't you wish you were her teacher now?

Holiday Bake-A-Thon

We have begun our holiday cookie/candy bake-a-thon. Every year I always tell myself I will make a bunch of treats, then package them up for friends and hand them out. I remember doing the same thing with my Dad when I was growing up. However, I don't think I realized then how hard that actually is to make, wrap and deliver so many treats to such a long list of people you want to spread some holiday cheer too. So most years, I start out with the intent to deliver holiday Joy to those I love but somewhere along the way i give up. I'm posting now to prevent that from happening this year. And to share this kid involved idea with those of you who might play this same game as me year after year.

We did Gingerbread candy cane cookies. The kid involved part was the candy cane dusting.

1. I did the cookie cutting on my own
2. While I did that I let the kids stomp the candy canes into dust. (I put the canes in a ziplock baggie and gave the kids something to hammer it with. Every once in a while there would be too many holes in the bag and we'd have to put it in a new bag.)
3. When the candy canes were made into a small/fine dust I put it into a cereal bowl.
4. Once the cookies were cool I striped frosting with a slanted icing tip (I used wilton #47)
5. Then as soon as a cookie was frosted I gave it to one of the kids who dipped it frosting side down into the candy dust and then put it back onto the cooling rack.

It went great. I'm happy because they look so cute and the kids were happy because they got to help. You can see in the picture our first cookie (The one in the top right corner) has candy chunks that look a little bit too big. After we did it we realized that we needed to crush the candy up into finer pieces.

I also made homemade caramel and I gave fudge a try again.

Last year I made batch after batch of flops with fudge. I wanted to learn how to make it without just melting down a bunch of chocolate chips as part of the recipe or using marshmallow cream, I wanted to make "real" fudge. I had one that I think I burned, another that never set (like hot fudge for ice-cream) and one that was so dry it was just a bunch of crumbles.

Well this year my fudge turned out almost perfect (My Dad would be so proud :) my one and only problem was that at the very moment I turned off the mixer to pour my perfect fudge into the pan to cool, Gwen's school called to tell me that I missed Gwen's bus. In the 10 seconds it took to take that call the fudge began to set. I scooped it out of the mixing bowl and pressed it into the pan as fast as I could. I know that it will still taste great, but the top just doesn't have that beautiful look that fudge has when it is poured before it sets up.

So I guess next time I just need to pay better attention to the clock, otherwise Gwen's bus driver will hate me.

Happy candy making

eagle scout cookies & Baptism cookies

A boy in my Sunday school class earned his eagle scout award last month. So I made cookies for him so we could all celebrate with him in class. They turned out great. (Sorry the pic is sideways.)

This is how I did it.

First I cut the cookies out with a round cookie cutter. Before they got cooked, I make a paper template of an eagle and lightly traced it into the dough with a paring knife. Make sure that you don't go all the way through the cookie dough to the pan. Now put the cookies in the oven for the time indicated on the recipe.

Next use brown royal frosting to pipe along the marks you made with the paring knife. After that has set for a little while, fill in the center of the eagle with runny royal icing (flood frosting)

After that I did the stripes. I was worried I would make them all wonky, so I used some edible markers to make some lines ahead of time and they were a nice guide. But you don't have to do that. I filled one side in red, the other blue and left the middle blank. Once they were dry, I put them in bags and everyone loved them.

Baptism cookies-

Another cookie cookie that I did recently went unphotographed but was cute. A different boy in my class got baptized and he asked one of the other students to baptize him. (I know, my students are awesome!) They are both Mexican, so I did gingerbread men with little white jumpsuits. They were cute, but not as yummy as they could have been because with my time constraints I had to use frosting from the store.

supper hero cookies

While my brother was in town we made super hero cookies. They were cute.

You don't have to get cookie cutters in order to make new cookie shapes, just find images on the computer that you like and pint them out. (Simple shapes are the easiest.) Cut it out of the paper and then place it on the dough and cut it out with a paring knife.

Birthday cookie recipes

For my daughter's birthday party this year we asked people not to bring gifts, but to bring cookies. Everyone brought 3 dozen cookies, they all took a few of each kind home. Here are the cookie recipes that were at the party.

• Chocolate crinkles and
• Chocolate Noogies both from familyfun.com
• Double-Drizzle pecan cookies from tasteofhome.com
• snicker doodles the recipe was almost the same as this allrecipe.com version, the only difference was that our cookies had an added ingredient 1 tsp vanilla
• sugar cookies from bakeat350.blogspot.com with piped royal icing and flood icing from universityofcookie.com (The only difference in the recipe is that I use honey instead of Com syrup and leave out the lemon flavoring in the icing recipe.)
• We also had some waffle cookies. I can't find the recipe, but here is one I found on allrecipes.com
• And some Oatmeal Chocolate chip cookies that I can't find something similar online so I've typed the recipe here

1 cup butter
1 but brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 cups oatmeal
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes

coast Gaurd Cookies

a man at church passed away last week and I was asked to bring some treats for the services. Since my Grandpa just passed away and I was not able to attend any of the services I was excited to help. Aparently he served in the US Coast Gaurd, so I looked up the symbol for the coast gaurd

And did my best to turn it into a cookie. Now that I'm looking at them side by side, I see that my lines are slanted in the wrong direction. Oops!

Oatmeal Rasin Cookies

Today I day dreamed about having my own cookie business. I created a blog I tittled it the All American Cookie Company and planned to donate one dozen cookies to America's heroes for ever order placed. But then I got a call from my brother (Who I had mailed some cookies to earlier.) He was happy that I sent the cookies but admitted that they arrived in crumbles and had gotten stale and dry.

I might not end up selling my cookies in the way I envisioned. Perhapse it will have to be a dream fullfilled latter, when I move back home after Sam's military career is done and running a business from a store front is a possibility. But I won't give up on my love of cookies. For now I can just perfect my recipies, techniques and strengthen my love for all things cookie.


this week I made my favorite cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies. (Recipe here)

• I had the idea of drizzling almond flavored icing on top. It was good and gave the cookies a cute look, but I still think they are just as yummy without the icing. I will probably ice them if I am giving them away, but for eating at home, we won't bother. I think the icing will be a requirement if the cookies stick around long enough to get stale/hard/dry.



• Another thing I tried out was instead of dropping the cookie onto the cookie sheet I rolled them into balls and flattened them with a fork. I didn't like the way they turned out so I won't do that again for these cookies. (Especially considering that it was more work.)

Cookie Crazy

I went cookie crazy this weekend. I discovered a cool cookie website called bake at 350

http://bakeat350.blogspot.com/

I was amazed at how willing the sites author, Bridget, is to share her ideas, recipes and process of making cookies. She also has a spin off website called university of cookie where she and her cookie professional friends post tutorials on how to make great/decorate beautiful cookies.

http://www.universityofcookie.com/

All the cookies I made were shown on the site or inspired by cookies on the site. I was practicing their method of flood icing. Basically you use regular royal icing to pipe an outline for what you want. then you go back after it has set and fill in the empty spaces with runny royal icing. It was messy but fun to have a chance to be creative.

Pink Roses-I piped the edge of the flower, then filled the whole thing in with flood icing (I found that if the icing isn't filling in the area right you can use a tooth pic to spread the flood frosting.) After that dried, I came back and piped on the dark pink spiral and the green leaves. (Next time I think I will do fondant leaves or pipe the leaves on curved parchment paper and apply them after they dry to give the cookie a 3 dimensional look.

Daisy in the garen-I piped out the flower center, petals and green outer edge. Then filled them all in with the flood icing. After it dried I added the white dots. (On the links above there are some cool examples of feathered frosting techniques that I tried with some of these but I think I need some more practice with it.)

Sea Shell cut out-I drew a sea shell on some heavy paper, cut it out and then used it as a template on the cookie dough. I cut the cookies out with a knife. I thought this was a cool idea because you don't need to have a million cookie cutters to be able to make a variety of cookies.

Lemon slices- Right after I piped the outline and the segments I put some yellow sugar sprinkles on a plate and dipped the cookie into it. After that dried, I went back and filled each section in with the flood icing. Next time I think it would be fun to add some lemon flavoring to the frosting.

I hope bake at 350 and university of cookie inspire you as much as they did me and you have a fun time making your cookies. I stayed up until midnight enjoying the process and doing it in peace with kids asleep in their beds.