Chocolate Chip Roll Out Cookies

I've been meaning to try a new recipe with decorated cookies for  a while and finally got around to trying this recipe recently.

It is really good, so good that only a few cookies survived to get any sort of decoration at all.

Baked Chocolate Doughnuts

The other day I decided I needed to make doughnuts but I didn't want just plain vanilla doughnuts. I wanted extreme, I wanted chocolate. And I had some leftover cream cheese frosting from another project and thought that would be delicious on a doughnut. 

He Is Risen

I threw together a few Easter cookies for my grandma this year. Yes - my grandma is the recipient of many of my projects. 

Grandma shared these with the ladies in a nursing home and brought smiles to everyone. One particular woman who suffers from Alzheimer's enjoyed them so much she asked for a second and even smiled - a rare occurrence that brought smiles to everyone. 

 I also left these stenciled chocolate chip Easter Egg cookies for Grandma to enjoy or share or enjoy sharing.

Bridge Cupcakes

I made some cupcakes for my Grandma's bridge party the other day. She has been quite busy with lots going on in our family so I thought I'd take a bit of burden off her shoulders. 

The Basics: Cookie & Icing

Now that you baked some cookies and you made your icing, let's decorate a cookie.

Having a heart...results

Hi!

I took a bit of a break from cookie-ing after the many hours invested in the fundraising I did in February. Also - if you're reading this blog, you probably know me or someone I know in real life and will already know that I'm pregnant and have had other projects and concerns of late. I do have a backlog of pictures to watermark and I'll be getting posts up to accompany those as I get time.

I wanted to let everyone know that I was able to make and sell enough cookies to donate over $500 to the family that my parents' VFW was fundraising on behalf of last month. You can read more about that story here.  The bake sale itself raised around $130 so I think I took the right road by selling them myself and then donating the cash. I don't remember exact figures... apparently I have pregnancy brain.

My husband was kind enough to put together a small collage of the cookies I made minus the last 75 or so that were just neon colors that I kicked out in exhaustion and did not take time to photograph. We included a copy of this collage with the donation money.

Thanks for looking and supporting this cause if you are one of those kind enough to purchase a cookie or two (or a dozen or six).

The Basics - Icing

Now that we've made some cookies, let's go over the icing you can use to cover them. As in all aspects of life, there is more than one way to do this - you can use many mediums to ice your cookies. The ones I'm familiar with are Glaze and Royal Icing or a bastardization of the two that I am growing to like more and more. The most important thing when using any of these recipes is getting the correct consistency for your needs. If your icing is too thin, it will spread all over and be a big mess; if it's too thick it will give you arthritis, break a tooth and generally not work out very well. I'm going to put some links in this post that are very helpful if you're interested in learning more.