CookieD-oh

After my foray into non-traditional colors, I decided to go whimsical for the rest of the cookies this year. Pink, green and white. Not too wild and crazy, just a little different. I'm digging this snowman. Am I allowed to say that about my own cookies?  Because it's true. And finally a plaque cookie I don't hate. Simple but pretty. Well, I'm off to do more decorating! I actually took this past week off of work just to make cookies. I barely even left the house. Not much of a vacation, but I enjoyed myself. Well, that's all for now. Enjoy!

You probably think I've finally lost my mind for real based on the title of this post.  But I haven't, I promise! Gingerbread men...in a forest! These are the cookies I made for the boy's Christmas party at school.  Since there are only four students in his class, I can go a little nuts with the cookies. And I've been wanting to try some 3-D cookies, so this was the perfect opportunity! I thought they came out kind of cute. That's all for now. Enjoy!

I made a few batches of non-traditional Christmas cookies this year. Well, the shapes were traditional but the colors weren't.   Turquoise, yellow, gray and white. I'm going through a phase where I really like gray and yellow together.  And I ALWAYS love turquoise.  Trees... Snowflakes... And another tray... They were fun, but I'm back to slightly more traditional colors now.   That's all for now. Enjoy!

Well, Christmas Cookie season is in full swing here in the D-oh household. The first thing I did was enter a cookie exchange.  Here's a photo of my 9 1/2 dozen gingersnaps. I love gingersnaps. So after that I had to make more gingersnaps, because the cookie exchange used up my whole inventory. Then I made a whole bunch of other cookies.  And while I was making sugar cookies, I cut out some snowflakes using my spiffy new snowflake cutter. But the only thing I could think of while I was making the snowflakes was reindeer, because the snowflake looked like reindeer. See...reindeer.  Some I turned into Rudolph, and some I left generic. The noses are red hots (cinnamon imperials if you want to get technical) and the eyes are black sugar pearls. Super easy. Anyhoo, that's all for today. Enjoy!

A friend asked me to make a cake for some friends of hers.  There are three boys and they celebrate birthdays at the same time.  (And I never thought to ask if they were triplets or something...I'm going to have to ask her now.) So they like sports. Basketball and Football.  And that's all the direction she gave me. She wanted two cakes, one for a family dinner and one for the party. Here's what I came up with. Family Dinner: Party: And that was the day I learned that my son doesn't know ANYTHING about sports. I felt bad. He thinks he would like sports if he could watch them, but we don't watch them. Mostly because we don't have cable. I need to get the boy to my brother's house, to watch some football, pronto. (He asked me what a quarterback was. I didn't realize it was as bad as that.) Anyhoo. That's all for now. Enjoy!

One of my coworkers is about to give birth, so we threw her a surprise baby shower. Guess who volunteered to bring cake? I made it to match the napkins. Chocolate cake, of course. Here's a close-up of the bow (in a box and sitting on a non-skid mat for transport): For some reason, I really, really like making fondant bows. I think it's because I loved Play Doh so much as a child. The bow was also sprinkled liberally with disco dust. Sparkly! Here we are spread out over the filing cabinets. And there are the napkins! Another coworker made a diaper cake and topped it with the cutest shoes ever: Anyhoo, it was a fun time.  Lots of food and fun to break up the day. That's all for now. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving is almost upon us! (I am making a concerted effort to not panic.) Before I get too busy with turkey and pie and stuffing and pie and sweet taters and pie, I decided to make some turkey cookies.  Because I can't remember if I've made turkey cookies before or not. I think maybe I have, but if I did, they were less than memorable. These, on the other hand, came out pretty cute. You know what the best part is? I used this cutter set from Wilton: That's right, I repurposed a snowflake into a turkey butt. Anyhoo, these are for the kids' Thanksgiving feast at school. Hopefully the kids won't be traumatized by the headless turkeys! Happy Thanksgiving...and remember to be thankful every day, not just once a year! That's all for now. Enjoy!

Like totally. For real, man. My lame photography skills don't do these justice. In some circles, I am renowned for my cinnamon rolls. I keep telling people how easy they are and that they can make their own, but nobody believes me. You believe me, don't you? If not, I'll prove it to you. First things first, go to the Pioneer Woman's site and steal her sweet dough recipe. Go ahead. I'll wait. Got it?  Ok make some dough. I made some...it was one and a half batches. I'm really glad I didn't go crazy and double it. That's my biggest stock pot right there. So, once you've made the dough let it sit in the fridge overnight. If your biggest stock pot is alarmingly full, you may need to get up a time or two in the night and punch the dough down. Maybe. But here's where we leave the Pioneer Woman behind and strike out on our own. And since I was making cinnamon rolls I forgot to take pictures (you can thank me later) and you'll have to...

A friend of mine from work brought me a picture of a cake a while back and asked if I could make it for him. He got it off of Facebook, so if it's yours, let me know. He's a big fan of M&M's.  But then again, who isn't? So I finally got around to making it. (I kept telling him I hadn't forgotten!) This cake used lots and lots and lots of M&M's. And as I drove it to work the next morning, every bump I hit I heard M&M's hitting the cake board. I made repairs at work and no one was the wiser. Red and Yellow were a bit bumpy. They're giant cake pops and I used off-brand candy melts to coat them. I repented immediately. I will only use Wilton candy melts from now on. I piped the faces onto waxed paper using royal icing and candy melts and glued them onto the pops the next morning. I made lots of extras just in case. And lots of extra "M"s, thankfully. I had quite a few snap as I was glueing them on. Chocolate ca...

I made some cookies to take to work a couple weeks ago.  I wanted to try something different...but not too different.  So I found this recipe on Pinterest and decided to try it out. It's originally by the Picky Palate ...click on the link for the recipe. I stuck pretty close to the original recipe.  I think the biggest difference was that I baked mine for about twice as long as she did.  About 20 minutes.  They needed it. They were some big honkin' cookies. Basically, two chocolate chip cookies with an Oreo in the middle.  They were pretty good.  I think they would be better with Reese Cups. Or even fudge covered Oreos. I made a double batch and got about four dozen cookies.  Huge cookies. Anyhoo, that's all for now. Enjoy!

It seems like there were lots of birthdays this summer. And I made lots of cake.  But didn't take many pictures. For example: I worked really hard on my great-aunt's 80th Birthday cake, and only took two horrible pictures. Here's the better of the two: She's not a pastel buttercream rose kind of gal.  And here you also have a little insight into what my kitchen looks like after a cake. It ain't pretty. Then I took two more bad pictures at the party, so I'll share those, too: Aunt Iva is an Ohio State Buckeye fan, so I made a scarlet and gray cake for her. :-)  As an aside, I love my Agbay .  Best. Tool. Ever. The other two cakes were chocolate.  The one in the foreground had mint chocolate ganache filling.  The one in the back (that you can't see...the pink one) had vanilla buttercream filling. Very tasty all around, if I do say so myself. Anyhoo, that's all for now. Enjoy.

One of the ladies from church asked me to make a cake for her mother's 100th birthday celebration.  I was honored, to say the least.  All she wanted was pink and purple and NO FONDANT. The rest was up to me.  No pressure! Anyhoo, that's what I came up with. It was massive.  14" and very, very heavy.  I make weird roses. I have only made one other 14" cake, and I had forgotten how big that really is. It ended up being too tall for the box so I had to prop the lid open.  It never occurred to me that the cake box wouldn't be deep enough. I felt a little betrayed by the box. Plus 40 cupcakes for the nursing home staff. Because who doesn't like cupcakes? I thought it came out nice, and she loved the cake, so yay! That's all for now. Enjoy!

Happy Autumn! Apparently I decided to take the summer off from blogging. It happens, I guess.  Things get busy and before you know it, the summer's over and the leaves are turning.  Stupid leaves. One downside to having a baking blog is that sometimes you get so busy baking that you don't have time to blog. Happens to me a lot.  That and I don't take pictures because I'm a lousy photographer.  But if you've been around here before you already knew that. So I finally decided to stop messing around with the bottles of vanilla extract at the grocery store. Found this one on Amazon.  Now hopefully I won't run out every week or two. My beautiful assistant started the first grade this year.  How did that happen? To prove that I've been baking, despite the lack of blog posts,  I took a picture. From left to right-ish: Honey Wheat Bread , Granola , Chocolate Cake , Peach Cobbler . Click on the links for recipes.  The peach cobbler has...

So I made another black raspberry pie . Still not crazy about the seeds, but the young'uns love the pie. Thought I'd get fancy this time and try a lattice top.  I totally screwed it up, but you can't tell unless you look closely. This time I added a little cinnamon to the fruit mixture.  I also took my potato masher to it.  But just a little.  I left lots of whole berries in the mix. Aaand pie: Do you like the paper plate? I know we've had discussions in the past about how classy this blog is. I just like to reinforce the issue every now and then. Well, that's all for now. Enjoy!