Happy Christmas Eve Day everyone! I can’t believe this year is almost over! I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to the blog lately (school, work, work, school) but I took a little time off last week and was able to get in some baking!
Here, in no particular order, are this year’s Christmas cookies! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and a Happy New Year! See you in 2017!
Hey all! How has everyone been? I’m dropping in with a quick post about some cookies I just made! I didn’t get a chance to take any nice, professional looking photos before I sent these out the door (new work responsibilities, grad school and attempting to have a life in between have me feeling like everything is moving at warp speed these days, know what I mean?) but I wanted to do a little write up, mostly to spread the word about a great charity.
Michael’s Way is an organization in the Philadelphia area that provides assistance to the families of children battling pediatric cancer. According to their website, “Michael’s Way has raised more than $6 million to lessen the financial hardships of hundreds of families whose children are suffering from cancer. 100% of money raised, as well as private donations and grants received from foundations goes directly to the families, not to overhead.” I think that’s pretty amazing given the number of “charities” that spend more per dollar on salaries, marketing and who knows what else than they do on actually helping people.
For the third year in a row PMC Property Group is sponsoring a bowling party at Lucky Strike in Philadelphia to raise money for Michael’s Way (4/20/16 – details here if you are interested!) and I was more than happy to make some Michael’s Way logo cookies for the event!
So here’s my crappy picture of what turned out to be a pretty cool cookie!!
If you suck at bowling or aren’t in the area, but are interested in making a donation to this wonderful organization head over to their online donation form!
Word on the streets is that some of you out there don’t like candy corn? How is this possible??? It’s almost as confusing to me as folks who don’t like PEEPS. Does. not. compute. But hey, to each his own, right?
Since candy corn is quintessentially Halloween in my book I thought I’d share some candy corn treats that don’t actually contain any candy corn. You’re welcome haters. 😉
First up – I made some candy corn decorated cookies! Everybody likes sugar cookies, right? (If you don’t, please don’t tell me. My head might explode.)
Everybody loved my mustache Easter bunnies so much that I thought I’d give the ‘stache a try on my candy corn too. As I suspected, these were a big hit.
I also made a super easy Halloween bark with Kraft Jet-Puffed Candy Corn Marshmallows and Wilton Halloween sprinkles.
Marshmallow Candy Corn Bark
Ingredients
2 – 12 oz bags of chocolate melting wafers, any flavor
Bag of Kraft Jet-Puffed Candy Corn Marshmallows
Halloween sprinkles
Directions
1. Melt both bags of chocolate in a double boiler, or follow the instructions on the package for melting in the microwave.
2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
3. Pour melted chocolate onto parchment paper and spread evenly with a spatula.
*IMPORTANT – if using a double boiler, make sure you dry the bottom of your pan thoroughly before pouring the chocolate onto the parchment paper. You don’t want any water dripping onto the chocolate. I just put a dish towel down on the counter and wiped the bottom of the pan across it a few times to dry it off.
4. Immediately top chocolate with marshmallows and sprinkles.
5. Cover with another piece of parchment paper and let the chocolate harden. If you’re in a hurry you can pop the tray in the refrigerator for about a half an hour, otherwise you can just let the bark rest on the counter top.
6. Once the chocolate has set, cut the bark into randomly sized pieces.
It really doesn’t get much easier than that, and look at how fun and festive that bark looks! Plus – chocolate and marshmallow – can’t go wrong there, right? Right?!
There you go, you despisers of candy corn. You can still have some candy corn treats this Halloween! We can all live together in peace and harmony!
You PEEPS hating people on the other hand… I can’t even deal with you. 😉
So, how do you feel about candy corn? Love it or hate it? Let me know in the comments, and have a Happy Halloween!
I know a really fun lady who asked me to make some Easter cookies for her grandkids so when I saw these Wilton icing decorations in the stores last week I knew I had to use them somehow. I’m pretty sure she’s going to love these funny bunnies and I hope her grandkids do too!
Every few months the awesome people at Operation Cookie Takeover ask for volunteers to bake and ship cookies to our deployed troops. I’m proud to say I have participated in every round! This time I was assigned a Marine stationed in Japan. I sent out an email to my department at work saying that if anyone wanted to send a card, note, or small treat along with my cookie shipment that I’d be glad to add it to my box.
Today I shipped three large flat rate boxes full of cookies, Easter candy, crackers, toiletries, cards, Tastykakes and other goodies. I work with some awesome people. Here is a shot of all my cookies and just some of the other donated items:
And here are some closeups of my cookies!
If you want to check out all the amazing cookies being shipped out this week head over to Operation Cookie Takeover’s Facebook page, or search the hashtags #OCT2015 and #operationcookietakeover on Instagram! If you know a deployed soldier be sure to follow their Facebook page and when the next mission rolls around you can sign up your soldier to be a cookie recipient!
I recently participated in another Operation Cookie Takeover mission. If you don’t know what OCT is all about you should check out their Facebook page! The quick rundown though is this – people nominate deployed soldiers to receive cookies from the volunteers who have signed up to bake and send them. Volunteers have shipped over 37,000 cookies to deployed soldiers since 2013!
This was the fourth mission and my fourth time participating. It was also, by far, my favorite experience.
My idea for this round of cookies was to create a cookie “postcard” – a handwritten, edible note of thanks. I have been seeing a lot of cookie decorators using the stamping technique to embellish their cookies and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to give it a try. I used a rectangular cookie cutter to make my postcards and covered them in a layer of white royal icing. Then I picked up a few postage related stamps from the craft store, read this tutorial on cookie stamping from Fancy Flours and went to town.
After trying out a few stamps I decided I liked the postmark one the best, so I stamped each of my postcard cookies with it. Because my cookies weren’t perfectly flat, sometimes the stamp didn’t lay the ink down evenly in all spots but I figured that was okay – most postmarks aren’t completely uniform so I’m calling it “authentic.” I let the ink dry overnight and then packed the cookies up and took them into work the next day for the fun part!
Along with my cookies I brought in a few sets of edible ink markers and set up a cookie signing station in an empty cubicle. I invited all my coworkers to stop by and write a note to the troops on one of the cookies.
Here are a few of them:
And here are all 24 together!
Thanks to the help of all my awesome friends at work these turned out so much better than I imagined. I was so excited to ship these off to the Marine that I was matched up with. I hope they all made it in one piece!
Fall is seriously THE best time of year. In addition to all the usual favorites (cooler weather, apple cider, gorgeous fall foliage, pumpkin EVERYTHING…) it is also the time for fun things such as my birthday (next week!), Halloween, signups for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap and the Go Bo! Foundation Bake Sale!
This amazing bake sale is put together by Jill from Jill FCS Funky Cookie Studio to support the Go Bo! Foundation’s mission of funding cancer research and helping the families of children with cancer in Door County, WI. This year cookie artists from ALL 50 states AND 17 countries have donated their time and efforts to this worthy cause. If you are in the area you should definitely go check it out! Don’t worry though if you can’t attend because you could seriously spend hours scrolling through the Go Bo! Foundation Bake Sale Facebook page looking at all the fabulous contributions. There are some seriously talented cookie decorators out there!
This year Jill asked that in addition to whatever themed cookies we wanted to make we also send at least one butterfly cookie. So here are the cookies I shipped out to WI last week:
“You only live once so make it count.” – Bo
If you would like more information or would like to donate, please visit www.gobofoundation.org.
I recently had the pleasure of making two batches of star shaped cookies for very different purposes. The first set was purple and pink starfish for a beach themed bridal shower.
The second set was for Operation Cookie Takeover. Tons of awesome people have volunteered to send over 12,000 cookies to our troops serving overseas! I am so happy for the opportunity to contribute once again to such a great cause.
I just read an article about a two year old who threw such a massive fit that her family was kicked off a JetBlue flight bound for Boston. My ears hurt just THINKING about the amount of screeching and screaming that must have been taking place for things to come to that. UGH.
I don’t want kids, and I oftentimes question the sanity of those that do. I mean, really – the screaming, the crying, the pooping, the puking, the snot, the not sleeping, the worry – and that’s all just the first night you bring one home! I value my sanity (and my nap time!), thank you very much. However, I LOVE shopping for baby clothes and shoes and toys – a frequent necessity since my friends are having them left and right. Small things are cute, what can I say? Chipmunks, mini cupcakes, baby booties…
Also cute – these cookies I made for a baby shower! A friend at work was throwing one for her daughter and asked me to make the cookie favors. We decided on a baby carriage and I ended up doing a very simple design, using only pearl dragees as decorations. Cute, classy, and unlike a baby – won’t get you kicked off a plane!
Last May my friend was having her son’s baptism. I was helping her look for centerpiece ideas and we both loved the centerpieces made out of cookie pops. Not only do they make cute centerpieces, but at the end of the party everyone takes a cookie and you have your favors taken care of as well. Plus, it’s a cookie on stick – what’s not to like about that? Well… there is one thing. The price!! Fifty, sixty bucks for ONE centerpiece! Obviously that wasn’t going to happen so I said, “We can make them for WAY less than that!”
Now, I’d never made a cookie pop in my life and my only previous experience with making any type of decorated cookie resulted in some slightly sloppy (but still cute!) Pac-Man Cookies. How hard could it be though? You cut out your cookie shape, put a stick in it and bake.
Well, for the most part it really was that easy! We decided to do angels and crosses. My friend got the cookie cutters, and the only real snafu was that the cross cutter made cutouts too small to be sticking sticks in. In the end I think that worked in our favor because we wound up making crosses out of blue melting chocolate instead and they made a nice contrast against the angel cookies.
I knew from my Pac-Man cookie experience that I would need an icing with a little thicker consistency to decorate the angel cookies and the good old internet told me that royal icing was the way to go. So I whipped up a batch using the recipe from the container of Wilton Meringue Powder that I bought and got to work. I’m definitely no artist, so all I did was trace the outline of each section (head, wings and body) and then filled them in. Being only my second attempt at doing a decorated cookie I had yet to learn about the technique called flooding which makes a much smoother finished product (more on that later!) so they were a little lumpy looking but other than that I thought they came out great.
I used an edible color marker to draw on the face, then wrapped each cookie in individual cellophane bags. For the base of the centerpiece I had purchased little white square buckets from Oriental Trading Company. I put a foam craft ball in each bucket and then stuck the cookie pops and chocolate pops into the foam. To cover up what you could see of the foam ball I used some green tissue paper and green gem stones. Here is the final product…
Not bad for not spending a fortune, eh?
Shake Bake and Party 