Girls just wanna have SHOES!

I seriously love shoes! I always want to buy them and then I always end up only wearing them once or twice! Its a fantastic habit to have when you need a shoe in every color! I thought that a high-heal shoe cookie would be a great cookie for Mother's Day. Of course just like a mother, I was running crazy the morning of and didn't get to finish any detailing to the yummy shoes, so I took only white shoes to my Grandma's house. But I saved a few back so I could beautify them and finally I have! In future shoe cookie endeavors, I want to try making them look like animal print heals using the right icing colors accordingly and piping it out loosely and then pulling a toothpick through them. Similar to the way I made the purple and black butterflies and a few of the baby bottles, but with thinner overall lines of color. Wouldn't that be fun! Oh dear, love of shoes must transfer over to love of cookie shaped shoes! I have a million ideas of ways you could decorate these shoes and then have one of them in every color too!

It's my party...& I'll eat cookies if i want to!

It's official, she's a real adult! Aunt Nicole has made it 21 years in this crazy world! Congrats! It was a fun celebration for my brother's girlfriend's birthday and we are all planing on a fun night on the town this weekend too! Two of my five brothers (and yes, no need to adjust your screen I did say five!) and their girlfriend's; one of which was the birthday girl, joined my husband and I for dinner this week and I brought some cookies along! Guess I really have turned into the cookie lady if I'm caring them around with me huh! LOL! I made little cakes for her and tried a new style of piping to make the "cake" look like it was really frosted. I made the icing very thick so that it would harden quickly and then piped it through the tip.  I will certainly use this cookie cutter again for future birthday's, more realistically for a baby's 1st birthday or something like that! And I will for sure be spending a little more time and a bunch more attention to detail in the decorating another time around! These I'm afraid look a little like we had already started celebrating! Se la vie! They tasted great! I used my Grandma's sugar cookie recipe that has sour cream in it and they were fantastic! Hard enough to decorate but soft enough to keep eating them all night! Happy Birthday my dear sweet Cole!

In full bloom!

My family is bursting with all things "babies" right now! MY wonderful brother is blessed with a healthy baby boy, Justin! He is just the cutest thing! And coming soon this fall will be my cousins little bundle! I was excited to make some fun baby cookies for my cousin's girlfriend's baby shower! This was also eventful because it was my first attempt at a gluten free dough! My cousin's girlfriend has celiacs disease and so I substituted alternative ingredients to my basic recipe. A word to my no-gluten eating peps; don't add to much xanthum gum to your mix! Those suckers will turn out to be some sort of strange, deformed looking glob of health food tasting cookie like substance! Not so good when you are giving them to a pregnant lady huh! So I made more dough with less bonding agent and then kept the dough very chilled up until rolling, cutting, and baking it off! Much better result and once they were iced you couldn't even tell they were different from the others! They even tasted half good too! :) Unlike myself that cant stand secrets and wants to always know as much detail about everything, my cousin has decided to wait on finding out the baby's sex and so the cookies were done, of-course, in yellow and green. So if anyone can't have gluten and you like sugar cookies and you want them to look radical, look me up, I'm your gal! 

Cute as a bug!

I was so excited to have my first real gig! Basically I made 2 dozen cookies for a friend's baby shower! It was a ladybug themed event! Do you know in this poor little Champaign, Il there are no ladybug shaped cookie cutters! What is this world coming to? (I miss the city!) So I ordered on-line and 3 ridiculous weeks later they arrived! I had many grandiose ideas for the ladybug cookies, but in the essence of a time crunch I went the simpler route! With typical bug colors these ended up so cute! I used my basic recipe for both dough and icing! And I hope it ended with a happy group of shower goers!