Every year, every Thursday the youth group at the George Mason chapel has a speaker and people in the church community volunteer to provide dinner. Each semester the choir at the chapel (that my parents are a part of) takes a week and we volunteered to make dessert.
I made cookies with their logo.
And I made cookies with the letters GMU (George Mason University) and CCM (Catholic Campus Minitries).
Dad went to the grocery store and bought green and yellow M&Ms and made chocolate chip cookies so everyone who didn't want a sugar cookie could have one of those.
Apparently people loved them and were taking tons of pictures. The priest of the church even made it his facebook cover photo :)
Next was a teacher appreciation lunch at small-one's high school. We again signed up to bring dessert and I made cookies with the school's logo.
Last summer I was captain of my work's volleyball team and for our first game I made volleyball cookies.
Small-one was obsessed/went to see One Direction in concert so for her birthday/to celebrate the concert I made her One Direction cookies using a template from Sweet Sugarbelle's website. She said her friends really liked them :)
For Father's Day I made watercolor-ish plant cookies because of his landscape design degree!
Next were the cookies I made for my grandparents 55th wedding anniversary. Since we were at the beach I went with simple star fish and some hearts.
And some sand dollars.
One of my goals in life (especially since I now live by the beach) is to find an intact sand dollar!
Later in the summer we went to Michigan to visit my aunts and I brought them cookies representing their town. I was going for a postcard theme. The top cookie is a boat because they . . . wait for it . . . like to boat, and the bottom cookie is of a lighthouse that is pretty popular in their town.
I also made some little Michigan cookies to fill out the set.
In the fall, Mom's office was holding a bake sale to raise money for their Christmas party so I volunteered to make football cookies. Funny thing was most of the people in her office bought them before they could actually make it to the sale! So they were financing their own party . . .
Next it was Dad's birthday! Can you tell that we like to rub in how old he is?! Let's just say we were eating candle cookies for weeks.
Of course with all the heat and flames the candles were putting off, you need a fire extinguisher (if the frosting looks wet that's because I finished the cookies super late at night and set them all up in his spot so he'd see them first thing in the morning!)
Have I mentioned I love bake sales? These cookies were for Small One's orchestra bake sale. So I made the treble clef, the alto clef (which violas play in and Small One is first chair viola), and the base clef along with the logo of our high school (which I already had practice doing from earlier in the year).
Are you still with me!? A year is a long time and I made a LOT of cookies! I like to use each set of cookies to get better and better at decorating and try some new techniques. So since this is the last half of the year, these cookies are some of my best and some of my favorites!
These are my Halloween cookies! Remember earlier in the year when I made the GMU CCM cookies for the Thursday night youth group? Well I wanted to make some more cookies for the fall semester since the earlier ones got such a good reactions. So we signed up again and since the Thursday fell close to Halloween I wanted to make gingerbread men dressed up for Halloween cookies. I first wanted to practice my designs though. So I traced a gingerbread man cookie onto paper, sketched my designs, and then tried two versions of each cookie. So these were just the TRIAL batch!
THESE are the final product! I wanted to make them yellow and green to speak to the school colors. Dad also made some chocolate chip cookies with festive M&Ms to go along with my cookies :)
These were some pumpkin cookies that I made for a breakfast Dad had at his office.
I tried a few different variations on the same shape just to experiment.
These little guys were for thanksgiving. I swear this was one of the first designs I ever did, but I couldn't find picture evidence.
So at the Christmas party for my mom's office (the party the football cookies helped raise funds for) I made these sculptural cookie trees!
I used chop sticks to keep all the cookie trees straight. It was so big that I had my mom take it to the party in a storage tub!
These angel cookies were for my grandma who wanted to say thank you to the deacon's wife and asked if I could make some angel cookies (since the deacon's wife loves angels).
Now for my first cookies made in SC:
These were for my grandpa's 80th birthday. He was in the Air Force and flew B52s. He also does HAM radio (the yellow symbol) and when there is severe weather and power is out he and his friend use their HAM radios to track the storms and inform the first responders.
Since Mom and I went to see Medium Well in Italy I thought I'd make some Italy cookies for her birthday. This one is of the duomo in Florence.
And here is my favorite place in all of Italy, Assisi!
And that's it for now, no more cookies just yet, but no worries I already have my next cookie idea brewing.
