Does the idea of making royal icing make you quiver?  Do you start to sweat thinking about pastry bags, frosting tips and food coloring?  Have you ever seen a bag of meringue powder and wondered what the heck it’s for?  Do you really, really want to learn how to make beautiful hand-decorated cookies?

If you answered YES to any of these questions then the

Cookie Rookie Decorating Class is for you! 

Join The Cookie Countess herself, at her private country castle – ok, um… or just come to my house in northeast CT… and let me demystify the basics of decorated sugar cookies. During this 3 hour class we will go over:

• making royal icing and using different consistencies for various techniques
• preparing pastry bags and bottles, and the different uses for both
• basics of outlining cookies… practice piping straight lines, circles, etc.
• how to flood cookies using both bottles and pastry bags
• wet-on-wet decorating techniques
• simple ways to make beautiful cookies

Each student will be able to decorate their own cookies during class to take home and show-off to their friends. You will have access to a Cookie Rookie, members only webpage that has recipes, tips and useful links to online tutorials and blogs to continue your cookie decorating education. Students will also have the option to purchase a cookie decorating starter kit for $15 that includes: 5 decorating tips, 5 couplers, 10 pastry bags, and two .75oz Americolor food coloring bottles.

Current Class schedule:

Girly Girl Cookies!  

Saturday May 18, 1-4

Class cost is $55 per person, plus a $15 materials fee. Payable in advance to reserve your spot.

Only 6 students per class! Email TheCookieCountess@gmail.com to enroll! 

I admit it.  I am addicted to Pinterest. I was definitely hooked from the start, using it as a place to find cookie inspiration.  But now I use it for everything from recipes, interior design, and looking at cute pictures of kittens. Ok, scratch that last one. I’m not really a cute-animals-picture-person.  And even though I may pin things with a trendy DIY theme, I have to admit, I’m not a particularly crafty person.  As a mother, I don’t do a whole lot of arts and crafts projects with my son.  We play with play-doh, and break out paints and crayons once in awhile – but most of our playtime revolves around monster trucks, legos, and trains. So when I see all these crafty kid projects on Pinterest they remind me of the mother that I sometimes wish I was. In other words – they make me feel guilty! I should be making homemade play-doh and doing melted crayon art! *Sigh*

A couple days ago my friend Stefanie pinned a picture of a little boy using a medicine dropper to drop colored vinegar into a pan of baking soda and claiming to be having “fizzy fun”.  I pinned it on my “kid stuff” board and moved on.  Then the next day, the craziest thing happened – Stefanie posted a picture on Facebook of her son doing the project! Gee – I just thought people pinned stuff all day; I didn’t realize they actually executed them.

And then I thought of of all my lovely Americolors gathering dust in my pantry, since I haven’t made cookies in a few weeks, and I became inspired.

I told my 3-year-old Jon Jon we were going to do a science experiment. To which he gave me a confused look.  Then I said, “Do you want to play with colored water and make things fizz?!” “Yeah!!!” he jumped up and down.  Oh I love having a boy.

So we mixed up some of our food color with vinegar and filled a pyrex with baking soda, and away we went. He had a blast.  By the end we were trying to make the “biggest fizzy that there ever was”.   And then when all the baking soda was covered in colors, he started using the droppers as chops sticks and picking up chunks of baking soda and dropping them directly in to the vinegar – which made “super big fizzies”.  Pretty exciting stuff for a 3 year-old.

Thank you Pinterest for making me crafty for a whole hour, and loving every minute of it.

(*I tried to follow the “rules” and find the original post this idea was pinned from, but it was from a phone and google search with no origin. So – thank you to whomever first pinned it! )

The internet is a funny place. You can find anything on the internet.  You can find people that like the same things you do, no matter how strange it is.  You can even find a bunch of crazy ladies who are obsessed with things like piping lines, icing consistency, and disco dust, and get excited about heat guns… and I’m proud to call these ladies my friends.

I’m part of a lovely little group of cookie decorators on facebook, and one of our own came up with a brilliant idea to throw a virtual baby shower based on different fairy tales.   Now it’s no surprise that this idea came from Anne Yorks of Flour Box Bakery , she’s the mastermind behind things like this and this.  We were all assigned a random fairy tale, and had to interpret it into cookies – but not just any old cookies – baby themed cookies. Also included in our project was One Sweet Party, who came up with beautiful bag toppers and paper accents for our virtual shower.  Can you guess what my theme was?

Ok – I’ll just tell you. Cinderella. So of course the first thing I did was Google “cinderella baby” looking for a little inspiration.  Well I found it in the form of a ridiculously expensive crib shaped like Cinderella’s carriage. And why not? What little angel isn’t worthy of a $4,791 iron chariot?  But still, it is very beautiful, and just the thing I needed to launch my cookie idea.

When I think of Cinderella, blue is the first color that pops in to my head. That beautiful blue ball gown that was the subject of many 6 year-old dreams.  Every little girl wants to be Cinderella – preferably without all the mice – but definitely with the glass slipper.  I am sure though that a modern day glass slipper would sport a red bottom.  But I digress…

I knew I wanted to write something on these cookies inspired by Cinderella… but what to write… what to write… and then it came to me, in a dream in a song…

And they all lived happily ever after…

Please check out the other cookies made by the decorators included in this project – you will NOT be disappointed! They blew me away with their unique and thoughtful designs!

Little Red Riding Hood ~ Oh, Sugar Events

The Wizard of Oz ~ The Painted Cookie

Aladdin ~ Life’s a Batch

Rapunzel ~ Color Me Cookie

Alice in Wonderland ~ Mt. Lookout Sweets 

Prince Charming ~ The Red Cooky 

Jack and the Beanstalk ~ Laura’s Cookies 

Princess and the Pea ~ Flour Box Bakery 

Pinocchio ~ The Hungry Hippopotamus 

Peter Pan ~ SweetArt Sweets

The Frog Prince ~ Sweet Hope Cookies

Jasmine ~ Sweet Creations

Little Bo Peep ~ Lorraine’s Cookies 

Tinkerbell ~ Cupookie

Hercules ~ Songbird Sweets  

Sleeping Beauty ~ Palestine Painted Cookie

Goldilocks ~ Arty McGoo

Robin Hood ~ Sweet T-CakeS

Thumbelina ~ Sweet Sugarbelle 

]]> http://blog.thecookiecountess.com/2012/01/23/once-upon-a-cookie/feed/ 11 http://blog.thecookiecountess.com/2012/01/01/these-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things-from-2011/ http://blog.thecookiecountess.com/2012/01/01/these-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things-from-2011/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:30:43 +0000 The Countess http://blog.thecookiecountess.com/?p=171

So considering I’ve only been making cookies for a year, it seems kind of silly to do a year in review of my favorite cookies.  But then I thought, what better a year to examine where I started and where I’ve gone since I first started making decorated cookies last January.

These are the first decorated cookies I made almost exactly a year ago for my son’s second birthday. They took me DAYS to make.  And it was before I knew enough to use Americolor coloring instead of Wilton, to avoid color bleeding.  But I was so proud of them. I was immediately hooked, and wanted to make more.  I think no matter what, these will always be among my favorite cookies ever.

I still love these “love trucks” I made for Valentine’s Day.  These are cookies I would love to remake knowing what I know now about icing consistency, and using a heat gun to avoid craters. I believe this was the first time I wrote on a cookie too! So nerve racking!

This was really my first big cookie “project”.  I made a life-size iPad cookie for my dad’s birthday. I had yet to find a chocolate roll-out recipe I liked, so I made a hybrid cookie/brownie one.  I did taste pretty good, but it did not hold it’s shape particularly well.  I made about a million “Ap” royal icing transfers, just to try and get a few good enough to use .  I would LOVE to make this again!!! Hmmm – maybe next year Dad? He does keep saying he wants an iPad2.  But I don’t think he’s talking about the cookie version.

This was my first mosaic style cookie. I wanted to make little individual cookies with castles on them for a party I was going to.  But then I thought: how the heck am I going to put a whole castle on a little 3″x 3″ cookie?! And so was born the mosaic cookie.  I drew it out on a piece of paper first, and then used my edible markers to do a rough sketch on the cookies to follow with my icing.  I think my favorite part of this whole this is the tree.  I just love that it actually looks like it has some dimension to it.

I still LOVE these cookies.  This was an order from a college friend I reconnected with through facebook. I look at this set and see the start of my love of using only a few colors to make a visual statement.  I was also really happy to be able to make cookies for two men that had just gotten married in Massachusetts.

This cowgirl cookie set holds a special place in my heart because they were the first order I ever received.  Jen, from Rhody Mammas and Keekoin, is a friend I know from my days of writing for Providence Monthly.  We also reconnected through facebook, and was one of my earliest cheerleaders when I first posted pictures of my cookies online.  Her order set in motion a notion that I may be on to something here with my cookies. Jen is also the girl who designed my amazing logos, for which I will be forever grateful!

This was the second mosaic cookie I made.  If you follow me on Facebook, you may remember the story of this cookie… I made it to bring to a Father’s Day BBQ with my dad and father-in-law.  But I had to hide it from my Dad, who had come to our house for dinner the night before.  I had the brilliant idea of putting it in the oven to hide, as I knew we were using our grill to make dinner.  But later that night my husband, unknown to me, preheated the oven to make a spontaneous desert.  Well… the picture tells the rest of the story.  The clouds took on the look of burnt popcorn, and the colors became a little muddled, and over all everything was a little crispy. I have yet to make another mosaic cookie – but I want to SO bad!! Just haven’t had the extra time to play.

I made this next set as a wedding gift to my cousin and husband for the dessert table at their reception.  I was given a bunch of images by my aunt that had special meaning to the bride and groom, and was asked to put them on cookies.  This was also the first time I had the honor of  having my cookies at a wedding.  I think my favorite thing about these are the colors.  So often cookies and cakes are covered with strong and vibrant colors. I loved working the the black silhouettes against such soft and soothing colors.

I’m not exactly sure why I love this cookie set so much.  Maybe its the colors, maybe it’s my love of olives.  Or it’s the client that ordered them.  I was asked to make these for a business meeting by an advertising agency in Boston. They sent me a link to Creta Farms, who makes healthy hot dogs from olive oil.  I knew I wanted to include some hot dog cookies in the set, but the companies website was so tasteful and pretty, I wasn’t sure how to make it all work together.  In the end, I loved how they came out and may possibly have made a few extra “olives” for myself.

I actually think these may be my favorite cookies from 2011.  These were an order for Providence Media, who operate RI regional magazines like Providence Monthly, East Side Monthly, and The Bay. I am from RI so thinking of iconic Rhode Island images to put on cookies was a blast.  I only made one of each cookie, and to be honest this order took me forever to make.  But I loved all the little details, and trying to figure out how to translate them in to icing.

These cookies were made for a dessert table for Sweet Indulgence. They are kind of typical me.   I had didn’t have much notice on making them, and yet I still decided to try new techniques I had never used before.  Like when I throw a dinner party, I always try a new recipe for the first time, and then cross my fingers.  I had never done this ruffle technique or brush embroidering before.  But I love the simplicity of them.  I am a big fan of making a statement without making a fuss, and these cookies do that perfectly.

Looking back at all my cookies from the year, I can see where my skills have grown, and where I still have learning to do.  But I am pleasantly surprised to see that each set of cookies seems more “me”.  I’ve had some wonderful opportunities this year to brighten people’s days with some fancy sugar and I look forward to doing it again in 2012.  Thank you so much to all who believed in me this year and pushed me in the direction of this new path paved in royal icing.  I have loved every second of it and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

In my first post, I confessed that I occasionally dream about cookies.  Well, I also think about them while driving, or in the shower, or on an airplane.  I remember Sugarbelle once writing about “cookie vision”, and how once you have spent enough time making cookies, you start to see the world in cookies.  Long story short, cookie ideas can come to you in the strangest places.  But sometimes, they just come in an email.

It’s nice when you have a client who is just as excited about cookies as you.  Kaitlin ordered her first cookie from me last Spring, as a gift to her JD loving dad.  Here it is… thirsty??

Kaitlin also ordered some other great cookies over the summer, but her last order was “epic”.  Or at least that was what we called it in our emails back and forth to each other.  She wanted to give a Words With Friends cookie to her boyfriend for his birthday.  Brilliant!! Why didn’t I come up with that?!?  I gave Kaitlin the task of thinking about what she wanted the “words” to say on the board.  Thankfully for me, she even sent along a spreadsheet with the layout! So where to begin…. (and please excuse the quality of these pictures. I had not really intended to do a how-to blog with them, I was just snapping pics with my phone as I went along.)

I started with hand cutting a cookie to meet the dimensional ratios of an iPhone screen. (Don’t I sound smart?!) The final cookie size was about 5″ x 8″.  Then I piped the header, footer and grid.

I then used my handy, dandy Americolor Gourmet black food writer to make dots where the letters were going to be.  But to double-check the placement, I changed my mind and decided to write in the actual letters.  Good thing! Because as you can see, my dots were a row off. Even the Countess makes mistakes once in a while.  Then I filled in my letter squares with my yellow/orange (or is it orange/yellow?) icing, followed by the different colors for the double letter, triple letter, triple word squares, etc, and the big letter tiles and icon balloons at the bottom and top.

With a project like this you have to exercise patience, and not put wet icing next to wet icing.  So squares need to be filled in in alternating sections and allowed to dry, so that they do not run together and lose definition.  A few weeks before I started this cookie, I read a post from Anne at Flour Box Bakery about using a heat gun to speed icing drying time, and conquer craters in royal icing. If you have decorated cookies before, you’ve probably encountered those nasty little demons that can make the perfect cookie like the surface of the moon.  A cookie like this WWF one, with all it’s little sections, would be prime for the cratering.  But not with my herculean heat gun! So big thank you to Anne on this one! When all my colored squares were dry, I filled in the rest with gray.

Once everything was filled in and dry I was able to add the final details of letter, names, and game icons.  I’m a fan of the game myself, so making this cookie was kind of a trip.  But I did have to ignore all my real games temporarily to work on my game cookie. Sorry!

Kaitlin was very happy with her Words With Friends cookie gift, and from what I understand her boyfriend was pretty pleased too.  She tells me it is still sitting on his coffee table, in the original packaging, to show off to friends.  Guess I can add interior decorator to my resume now! 

I have a confession to make.  I occasionally dream about cookies. Kind of scary for a gal who picked up her first piping bag just shy of a year ago. And what started as a hobby quickly turned into an obsession, and then to a possible new career path. Last month I decided to kick it up a notch and launch a website and blog.  The website was kind of a no-brainer: start business = have website.  But I have writing in my blood, so I thought I’d try my hand at blogging about my new cookie world.

But first I had to think of a way to get readers to notice my new blog.  Hmm… think, think, think.  I know!!! I’ll give them free stuff to read my blog!! No, wait.  That’s kind of like bribing people.  Right? But it works!! So… I’m giving you free stuff in exchange for reading my blog.  But you’ll come back again, even if I don’t give you free stuff – right?!?  So what are you getting for all this reading you have promised to do?

Drumroll please!!!! First to get ready for Christmas, I’m sending you 2 sets of super cute holiday themed cookie cutters. Are you excited yet? 

 Next – and this is kind of a big next… You’re getting a copy of Julia Usher‘s new book Ultimate Cookies! A few months ago I received an email from Julia herself, asking me if I’d like an advanced copy of her book.  Yeah, I’m kind of a big deal. I mean have you seen the resume on this woman? Director of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards finalist, and wicked cool cookie artist. 

This book totally rocks.  I have NEVER seen cookies like the ones in this book.  Even if all you do is look at the pictures, while filling up with massive amounts of cookie envy, and never even make the cookies yourself, you will still love this book. She gives you major amounts of how-to’s from decorating basics, to more complex projects like 3D cookies and working with things like wafer paper, and stencils.  If you really want to impress your family and friends at Christmas this year you could make some of the cookies in her book, like this….

 Or these…

There’s also lots of cookie and icing recipes, and templates.  One of my favorite sections of the book though is the resources chapter.  Here she has done all the homework on which websites carry which tools and decorations for all your cookie needs.  Love it!!!  If you don’t win this book here, you should still buy yourself a copy.  Or tell Santa you need it so you can make him something other than chocolate chip cookies next year.

And last, but not least, you’ll receive some cookies from ME! Because, really, it’s all about me. You will be able to stuff yourself silly with 6 lovely fall themed cookies from The Cookie Countess herself.

So what do you think? Have I significantly bribed you enough to come back another day and check out my blog? Here’s how you can win all these great items… Like my page on Facebook, and then since it is Thanksgiving weekend, leave me a comment here on what the best thing you ate on Thanksgiving was.  Comments need to be left here on the blog, not on Facebook. One entry per person. Contest will remain open until Friday, December 2 and 9pm EST. If you want to tell others about this contest, just share it using the Facebook, Twitter, or email buttons below.  It won’t get you an extra entry into the contest, but I will be your BFF.

Thanks for reading my first blog post! Phew!!! That wasn’t too bad…

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