Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Mother's Day Cookies

We take a break from our irregularly scheduled basement renovation updates to bring you a reminiscent Mother's Day post!

For Mother's Day I wanted to make some pretty cookies and try out some new techniques and I thought the perfect people to send them to would be my grandmas!  So I made two sets of cookies and shipped them out.  They got there on Monday but I think they arrived intact and still tasty so all was good.




This was the big cookie I made for them.  I'd seen this idea on another blog and I had tiny frosting tips so I wanted to try it.  Essentially it's doing cross stitch with frosting.  You take a tiny tip and draw a grid on the cookie.  I then printed off a cross stitch pattern for a rose and using green and red frosting I made dots where all the crosses would be. 




It's a pretty simple technique it just takes a long time to draw the grid!  The lady whose blog I saw this idea on did portraits of people.  I didn't think my grandmothers would appreciate a cookie portrait of Oprah so I stuck with a rise.




Here's the rose cookie all finished!  (If the pixelation is giving people a headache, just step away from the computer screen and it will all be clear).




Here are both of them finished :)




The rest of the cookies took a whole different direction.  I went with pastel colors and tried other techniques.  For these cookies I did and outline and then filled the outline in with a lot of parallel lines, almost like needlepoint.




I don't know why but this one really reminded me of the rose in Beauty and the Beast which is like one of my favorite movies ever!

Quick trip down memory lane: when I was really little, like 4 or 5, you didn't go to the store to buy movies, you ordered them on the phone and they were delivered to you in the mail.  Well it was close to Christmas and a package had come in so my dad put it on top of the fridge for safe keeping.  Apparently at four years old I hadn't figured out how to scale furniture yet.  Anyway mom and dad got to talking a few weeks later about why it was taking the movie so long to come in the mail and dad was like oh a package came in weeks ago but I thought it was for Christmas so I put it on the fridge.  They then retrieved the package and covertly opened it and surprise it was the movie.  I was standing in the kitchen the whole time this was happening and remember thinking that I knew that wasn't a Christmas present but whatever.  So they both turned to me and were like surprise here's a movie!  Yay! lol anyway I got Beauty and the Beast out of the deal and probably drove them both nuts watching it constantly but hey it was a good movie :)




I also tried some of my lace cookies again.




And I tried only flooding the middle of the cookie and doing lace around the outside edge.  I apologize for jipping people on frosting.  For some reason the blue frosting is looking really alienish to me in this picture.  Hmmm I promise it's not radioactive.




And finally I tried out a swirly pattern thing that I'd seen on another cookie blog (I read so many cookie blogs it's ridiculous.  Never gets old).  It didn't turn out as spectacularly as I wanted so I'll prob skip this one next time.




All the cookies together.  I split these into two sets and sent them out with one big rose cookie so the grandmas would have a little variety (and a lot of cookies).



These were the flowers Dad got Mom for Mother's Day.  She got them a day early because he picked them up on Saturday and put them in the outside fridge to keep fresh but lo and behold Mom made dinner and went to the fridge to get some ingredient and there the flowers were nestled between the eggs and the broccoli.  Surprise!  Lol




Here you can see more of the bouquet but all I really cared about were the roses.  They were orange and gorgeous.



And finally, since I'd made cookies for my grandmothers for Mother's Day it's not like I could forget to make my Mom some cookies, so I made her a piano!  And this is a completely accurate representation of a piano with the right number of keys btw.  The size of the keys is not as accurate but at least it's close.




My mom has played piano off and on for the churches we've gone to since I was in middle school.  She plays all the time at home as well, so I thought it was appropriate :)




I didn't have long, thin rectangle cookie cutters to use so I used a pizza cutter to cut out the rectangles.




I used sugar cookies for the white keys and gingerbread cookies for the black keys.  I'm smarticle like that ;)  




Of course I made her actually play the "piano" too :)  Oh and bonus, there's the piano in the background!  So Happy (belated) Mother's Day to all you moms out there!

2 comments:

  1. And I repeat: you could totally decorate cakes with those cookie-decorating skills. And I LOVED the swirly pattern -- you should do it again because it's beautiful!

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    1. Cakes are a whole different ball game, though, because the surface you're decorating is vertical not horizontal. It takes a lot more wrist strength and control. Also the thickness of the icing consistency lends itself to squeezing it out of the piping bag and letting it "fall"onto the cookie. If I'm ever back in manhattan we should do a baking day where you show me how to decorate cakes and I'll show you how I make my cookies!

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