Halloween Cookies

Happy belated Halloween everyone!

Halloween just so happens to be Emily's favorite holiday. So I figured, what better way is there to celebrate than by making more cookies!

For this batch, we opted to make Jack Skellington heads, Biology bats and pumpkins (for a more traditional approach). For those of you not in the know, Jack Skellington is the main character from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" movie. It's one of Em's "go to" movies, but I must admit that have never watched it.

You may also be questioning... what in the world is a Biology bat??? Let me explain. Emily attended her first Biology lecture with several hundred other students and, shortly after class commenced, a bat started flying around the hall. The bat stayed for the entire lecture (science geek that it was) and Em later discovered that Animal Control came and released it back into the wild. The bat cookies were adorable, but I quickly came to realize that I needed to condense "Biology" to "Bio" as I just couldn't make the entire word fit on the cookie for the life of me.

It is also worth mentioning that we used a different royal icing recipe for this batch. Oddly enough, everyone that tried these cookies seems to prefer this icing to the one used for the graduation, U of I and cupcake cookies! I think that we have found a keeper!

Birthday Cupcake Cookies

Hello everyone!

My daughter moved to U of I shortly before her 19th birthday, so I wanted to make her a special batch of decorated cookies to enjoy with her new friends on campus. After perusing Pintrest for ideas, Maureen came across an adorable anime-ish cupcake cookie design which I knew Em would love.

I attempted to do the "wet on wet" technique for the cupcake wrapper stripes, but that was much easier said than done. The orange royal icing was drying faster than I could apply the pink! All-in-all they turned out adorable... not to mention yummy!

High School Graduation Cookies

Shortly after posting the U of I cookie post, I realized that I had neglected to blog about Em's high school graduation cookies!

This was the  very first time I had ever attempted sugar cookie decorating and this project was a collaborative effort between myself, Maureen and my mom. Elmwood Park High School's colors are black and gold, so we opted to keep with that color scheme for the diplomas and graduation caps.

Some of the cookies didn't turn out quite as perfect as I would have liked, but everyone at her graduation party found them to be quite tasty!

College Send-Off Party - U of I Cookies

Hello everyone!

I know that it has been an extremely long time since I have blogged! (My apologies.) However, I am happy to report that my daughter is now completely settled into her freshman year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Biology major.

Before officially becoming "empty nesters", Maureen and I found a fun (and time consuming) hobby to keep us occupied until our next trek down south for a campus visit. Cookie decorating!

Prior to Em's departure for college, we threw her a little send-off to celebrate the occasion. Unfortunately, we were not successful at finding a suitable "I" cookie cutter or stencil to make these cookies perfect. So... we opted for making round cookies and, using this icing recipe, we decorated the cookies freehand.

They didn't come out quite as perfect as I would have liked, but my hopes are that our decorating skills will get better with a little more practice. Everyone at the gathering had a great time and the cookies went like hotcakes. Especially with a yard full of teenagers!