Holy Week Cookies

It has been a busy few weeks!  First Medium Well came home for spring break, and we celebrated Mom and my birthdays, and then Small One had her spring break, and then it was Palm Sunday and Holy Week and Easter!  Now, for normal people, Holy Week wouldn't entail much other than going to church and fasting a bit, but for people in choirs is entails a lot of singing and piano playing.  A LOT of singing!  Let's see, Mom and Dad were doing Palm Sunday mass on Saturday night so Mom played piano constantly and practiced with Dad who was doing a solo/meditation piece along with all the regular songs.  Then they had a bass practice at the house for all the basses in the choir (and some of their alto wives who tagged along) to practice their parts for Holy Week and Easter.  Then there was the practicing and going to mass to sing the songs.  So there has been a lot of music generated in the house these past two weeks.  Which is just fine I guess.  I do miss singing in a choir.  I'm sitting there listening to all this music (btw Good Friday music is my favorite music of all time) and I miss college when I belonged to a choir and would go to all the Monday night practices for Holy week starting pretty much a month before Easter along with the regular week practices (then there was that one year where we had Holy Week practice, regular practice, AND trip choir practice!).  I haven't found a choir I want to join yet here.  All the choirs I've heard sing boring, unenlightened songs and they're full of old people.  Siiiiiiigh.  Oh well.  I did find myself pulling out the music I used to sing and belting out the soprano parts this week while plunking out the notes on the piano and trying to figure out the flats (seriously there must be a rule where all Holy Week songs are in keys will a million flats!).
So this brings me to the point of my post!  Since I miss singing with my college choir so much, and since I can't justify buying a plane ticket to fly to Manhattan for one Friday and then fly home in time for Easter, I decided to send cookies to the choir instead! 
I had to plan the cookies out and figure out what I wanted to make and get the cookie cutters ordered from Amazon (which worked out nicely since I ordered them at the same time as Mom's birthday presents.  What didn't work out so nicely was that packages would come in the mail and I would open them thinking they were cookie cutters and they were actually presents for me!  I closed the box up and told Medium Well to tell mom she opened it . . . ).  I mean what type of cookies say "Holy Week"?  It took some brainstorming but I finally came up with what I thought were some good ideas!

First thing I thought of was a cross, but I knew that there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I would be able to draw a recognizable Jesus using frosting.  I wouldn't even be able to draw a decent Jesus unless it involved three erasers and many, many sheets of paper.  So I went with a less literal translation but I thought it was still pretty meaningful.  I liked the idea of turning the nail holes into roses because what the nail holes signified was so beautiful.

I'd never piped roses before and after running to Michaels for new frosting tips and trying for an hour to figure out how to pipe roses small enough to fit on the cookies, I wound up just using a star tip and making a swirl and adding a dash of green for a leaf (to make people go "Oh!  It's a flower not just a red swirl!).  I think they looked enough like roses to convey the point though :)

Now, since I was sending these cookies to my old choir I HAD to include a music note cookie (we already had a music note cookie cutter, go figure).  I didn't really want to send just a cookie with black frosting.  Woo Hoo Beth is so talented she can ice a cookie!  Lol so I added a red flower to match the cross cookies.

Now I was excited because I got to try a new technique for these cookies!  I think it's called brushed embroidery?  Anyway, it's where you draw a line of frosting, then take a small brush dipped in water and blotted on a paper towel and brush the frosting down.  It's kinda hard to explain but I'll post pictures of the process so it will make it clearer!


  

But I liked how they turned out.

The final cookie I did was a lily.  When you think Easter you think white lilies but it wasn't Easter just yet so I went with somber colors and still made a lily.

This is a starfish cookie cutter btw.  In case you ever have to make a lily cookie you can use a star fish cookie cutter and it works just as well!

Oh and all this dark icing to match the somber mood of Holy Week?  Yeah it can color your teeth!  I suggest chewing with your molars and brushing your teeth!  (no worries it won't stain your teeth, it will just turn them pretty colors and cause the people around you to amuse themselves at your expense).  I included gum and Wisps in the box to clean off peoples' teeth in case they were worried.

Here are all the cookies together!  Not a bad group of cookies if I do say so myself :)
So I mailed the cookies last Monday and the post office promised me that they would get there on Wednesday so I didn't have to pay for next day shipping.  Well it turns out they didn't get there till FRIDAY when of course everyone was fasting and couldn't eat them.  So I hope they ended up tasting ok and I hope none of them got broken.  It's stressful sending cookies! 
Word of advice, the Manhattan post office is pathetic and always send cookies way in advance.  Sigh.  But in case they were a total bust this is what they were supposed to look like!