Wedding Favors

A couple of months ago a good friend of my husband's asked me if I knew of anything she could do bake and make herself as a wedding favor. Since she is the bride, I couldn't very well just let her make all of these cookies herself when she also had a new baby at home. She is having an Asian inspired wedding and asked for a cookie with 3 tiers and flowers. Simple, yes? I drew up a design and scanned it over and we settled on a cookie with different sized flowers scattered across the cake and "ribbons" at the base of each tier. I didn't really want to pipe and flood all the cookies (hey, it takes FOREVER...and I'm not very good at it yet) so we also decided on MMF instead of royal icing and the accents would be made out of Fondarific. Good? Good! So this is what we came up with:


This was the size comparison - the left is a 3" cookie, and the right is 4". I like the tiers better on the larger cookie myself but the bride likes the 3" cutter, though so that is what we are using. It's by Wilton if you are interested and comes as a set of 4 wedding themed cutters.

However, genius that I am (this is being typed with a hugely exaggerated eyeroll,) while shopping recently I found something that I like better and have now pretty much scrapped this entire plan only to replace it with a much more time consuming cookie. Ugh. Someone shoot me. I need to know when to just leave it alone. I mean, these cookies are cute, right? Of course, these were just playing around so the actual favors would have been much neater and more consistent. I am now going back to the drawing board to figure out how long these new cookies are going to take me. BTW, yes, I do have issues but the new ones really look good!

To be continued...

Cookies for Kaitlin

A co-worker's daughter made her acting debut last night. Her school did a play that was a take on "The Ugly Duckling" except their play is called Honk Jr. What better way to celebrate a 3rd grader's play then by giving her cookies? Yes, I know you should give flowers but really, she's 8. She'd much rather have cookies. Heck, I'm past 8 and I would rather have cookies! What I decided to do was make her a bouquet and make it out of cookies, and personalize it for her. The cookies were easy enough. I just used my current favorite sugar cookie recipe - it's called No Fail Sugar Cookies or NFSC for short and iced them in Antonia74's Royal Icing recipe. Obviously I still need to work on my flood work but it's actually getting better. Yes, it was worse before.

I put the cookies on 8" & 11"sticks - lollipop sticks are fine. Don't be sucked into the whole "cookie stick" deal. Cookie sticks are thicker than lollipop sticks so your cookies will need to be very thick and you will have to adjust your baking time if you go that route. Oh, in case there's any confusion, the sticks go in before you bake them. ;o)

After the cookies were iced, they were sealed and tied with a ribbon, then they were arranged on tissue paper to give it a "bouquet" look. I had leftover plastic bags left from Christmas so I cut one open, then wrapped it around the cookie so it really did look like a bouquet. Tied it with ribbon and voila! 1 cookie bouquet fit for an actress.


I really wish I had taken better pictures of the cookies before they were given away but I was late for work so I was only able to take a couple with my phone. There is a big star at the back where I wrote Kaitlin's name in food coloring pen, the blue cookie on the side has a small star shaped cookie glued to it and I wrote "Best Duck Award" because I didn't think she would know an Emmy or Oscar.

I also did a silhouette-ish cookie and wrote "Beaky" on it since it was her character's name. This was the practice:


There were 2 cookies that didn't make it into the bouquet. One because well, I don't know why I didn't put the big flower in there but the second...his head broke off and I didn't want to traumatize anyone by giving them a cookie with a decapitated head. I don't have the funds to pay for their therapy.

The rejects. Can you see where his head broke off?

Peanut Butter Oreo Brownies

A couple of weeks ago a huge brownie appeared on my desk. It was no ordinary brownie. It was Nabisco's new Oreo Brownie which is HUGE. 340 calories worth of huge. Needless to say, it is still sitting on my desk. I don't want to eat it but I don't want to give it away either. I'm just keeping it there you know, just in case. Fast forward to this weekend and I find myself searching for recipes that will travel well to my recently deployed brother. (If you're searching for recipes too, click here.)

Let me tell you, those Oreo Crunch Brownies jumped out and grabbed my attention! But then I started to think about peanut butter brownies and boy do I love those too. So what the heck, why not jumble it all together and make some Peanut Butter Oreo Brownies?

The result was dangerous. It made a 9x13 pan of fudgy, chocolately, peanut butter swirled, Oreo cookie yumminess that I wanted hide in the closet and eat by myself. But don't worry. Some went in the box and rest got banished from my home and is on it's way to a friend's house where it will be demolished shortly.

If you need to feed a craving yourself, make your favorite peanut butter brownie recipe and toss in about 20-25 quartered Oreos. You could cut them smaller if you'd like but I found that anything smaller than that and the cut cookie would flatten and the filling would ooze out of the sides.

Oh, and as for calories in my brownies? I'm going to go with 0 since they were made with love.

Bacon Caramel

Oh yes my friend, you read that right. BACON caramel. Now don't go knocking it until you've tried it. I've made bacon chocolate chip cookies that were okay...probably because I skimped on the bacon what with that being my first experiment into adding bacon to the baking...note to self: make those again. But this time I followed directions exactly and it was so worth it! These candies are simple to make provided you have good candy making weather (not too humid, please) and patience. It also uses ingredients that you should easily have on hand. Best of all, they travel well whether you're sending them off in the middle of the holiday season or sending them off to a friend who apparently gets her mail via mail horse with a proclivity to stop off for a drink or 10. Not to worry though. I've been assured that the horse will be getting treatment soon.

Hello out there!

It's time to get serious. It's a new year and that means that it is time to focus on my baking for real, this time. If anyone is out there then I just want to say "Hi! Thanks for stopping by." I've been trying to take a break after marathon baking over the Christmas season but my fingers are itching to get back into some dough so my self-imposed break may be coming to an end. Come back again soon and see what I've been up to.