I made chocolate sugar cookies to decorate for my colleagues at work to celebrate Valentine’s Day. I used a simple heart-shaped, scalloped-edge cookie cutter. In the interest of time, I covered most of the cookies in pink and red cookie icing and dipped them in a variety of sprinkles.
Here they are:
I also made some cookies out of a Secret Santa gift that I received from a colleague. She gave me cup hugger cookie cutters in Christmas shapes. I used the snowflake shape and gave those to my colleague. Here they are, decorated with white cookie icing and white sparkling sugar sprinkles, with additional heart cookies and a single circle I made with the final leftover dough:
Here’s hoping your Valentine’s Day was super sweet!
One of our neighbors — who also was the baseball coach our son played for in middle school and high school — had back surgery. He has always been a big fan of a snickerdoodle bread that I make, so I figured a big snickerdoodle cake with brown sugar cinnamon buttercream frosting would be the perfect thing to help the healing!
This frosting recipe makes a ton of frosting. If you only do two layers of the cake (and don’t cut them in half like the recipe recommends), you will have lots of frosting leftover. For people who have texture issues with food, this frosting does have a bit of texture to it and can feel grainy. But the taste is AMAZING, so if the texture isn’t an issue, you’ll love this frosting.
The cake is very dense and is heavy to carry around. You’ll need a sturdy carrier if you plan to transport the cake.
Here’s hoping the richness of this cake helped to speed up the recovery process!
What happens when you are over ambitious and make too many Christmas-themed cut out cookies? Well, you spend the New Year’s holiday decorating them to take to work for your colleagues to enjoy.
There were chocolate sugar cookies in the shapes of Christmas trees and stars, decorated with green and red cookie icing and a variety of sprinkles and other decorations.
And more chocolate sugar cookies in star shapes with red, green, blue, white, and black cookie icing and a variety of sprinkles:
Finally, there were gingerbread rollout cookies in snowman shapes. The recipe is one passed down by my mom, and here it is:
They were finished using white, black, red, blue, and green cookie icing, as well as a variety of sprinkles and decorations. The “carrot” nose was created using white cookie icing piped on top of the flooded white icing after it had set, and dusted with orange sanding sugar.
Regardless of the time of year, there’s always joy when holiday cookies are shared with others!
I have a dear friend who has been in a 10 year battle with triple negative breast cancer. Whenever I have the opportunity to make her a treat, I do. She has found the word “HOPE” to be her guiding light through her cancer journey – the ups, the downs, the setbacks, and the small triumphs. Her religious faith and her belief in HOPE have given her strength when she felt she was unable to go on.
For Christmas, I made sure I had put aside some of the extra gingerbread roll out cookies in candy cane shapes, as well as one Christmas tree shape for her and her family. I decorated three candy canes in blue cookie icing and white decorations (her three children have all gone to or are attending Penn State), and one candy cane and a Christmas tree in white cookie icing with pink decorations. Here is a picture she posted on Facebook after I delivered the cookies:
I HOPE that everyone can find a way to bring love and light to friends and family, not only during the holidays, but whenever you have the opportunity.
For our family Christmas party, I made two desserts. The first was Christmas tree cupcakes, and the second was a Reese’s bar.
The Reese’s bar is a very simple recipe, but it was a total hit. There was none left after the party. Depending on how large (or small you cut the bars), it can feed a big crowd. Definitely chill the bars and then cut them.
The cupcakes were similar to the ones I had made for my husband’s family Christmas gathering. They were vanilla cupcakes, with green frosting Christmas trees piped on, gold and silver star decorations at the top, and other Christmas-colored sprinkles. Around the base of the tree, I piped on vanilla bursts and topped them with white sparkling sugar.
Each year, I bake goodies and provide treat baskets/bags for my team at work during the Christmas holidays. I typically use my favorite gingerbread rollout cookie recipe because it’s 1) totally yummy, and 2) makes a ton of cookie dough. I also use powdered sugar when rolling out this dough (it’s very sticky, even after being refrigerated), because I think using flour tends to dry out the dough. Plus, the powdered sugar provides an additional touch of sweetness.
This year, the shapes includes stars, snowmen, Christmas trees, candy canes, and — Elf hats! While searching for Christmas cookie decorating ideas, I saw that someone repurposed a candy corn shaped cookie cutter and made Elf hat cookies. Since I have those candy corn shapes (in a variety of sizes), I decided to make the largest version for my boss, who had this cardboard cutout in her office window during the holidays:
Here are the Elf cookies prior to adding the final touch – the red feather. For the yellow section, I added yellow sugar sprinkles on top of the royal icing:
And here are the Elf cookies with the red feather, piped on with a leaf tip:
Here are the remaining cookies, decorated with cookie icing in red, green, white, black, and blue. A variety of sprinkles, sugar pearls, and dessert decorations were used to finish the cookies after the cookie icing was applied.
Here’s hoping your holiday season was filled with great memories and some goodies to help make things sweet!
Each year, my husband’s brother and his girlfriend host a Christmas gathering for family and friends. And each year, I bring dessert.
This year, I made cupcakes that were decorating two different ways. I picked Santa hats and Christmas trees as the decoration style. I used a French vanilla box mix, and canned red, green, and white frosting. I substitute milk for the water in box mixes and add a teaspoon of vanilla extract to help make it taste more homemade.
For the Christmas trees, I piped on the green using a 1M tip, squeezing more on the bottom layer, and less for each layer to get the shape of the Christmas tree. I then decorated the trees with a variety of sprinkles and topped them with either a gold or silver star decoration.
For the Santa hats, I piped on the red in a circular fashion, wider at the bottom. I used Wilton’s ruby pearlized sugar sprinkles and added a medium size white sugar pearl on top.
I had made cookies for a baby shower for a friend, and one of the guests at the party reached out to ask if I could create cookies for the impending arrival of her second grandchild. I agreed to make the cookies for this baby shower as well, because the grandmother was actually retired from the high school my kids attended.
The request for this shower was baby bottle-, teddy bear-, flower-, and onesie-shaped cookies in the chocolate sugar cookie flavor. I didn’t have a baby bottle cookie cutter, so I went online and saw this baby cookie cutter set…and obviously missed the “mini” in the description. I ordered it, went to pick up the set, and was a bit surprised at how small the cookie cutters were. Unfortunately, I had waited too long to try and order the shape from another source in a larger size.
I used pink cookie icing and white royal icing to decorate the cookies.
The onesies were decorated in a variety of designs, and I added embellishments like sugar pearls and sprinkles.
The baby bottles were all decorated the same way, using pink cookie icing, white and a very small dab of brown dye to create a beige color royal icing. I added the Sweet Tooth Fairy pink candy hearts on each bottle. I will say that if you have a baby shower party where you need a large number of treats, these cookie cutters will definitely give you the numbers you need.
I decorated the teddy bears using the beige royal icing with small candy eyeball sprinkles, the candy hearts for the bottom paws, a pink sugar pearl for the nose, and chocolate cookie icing piped on to make the mouth and ears. I ran out of the beige icing and made a couple of the teddy bears in the pink cookie icing.
The flower cookies were decorated in white royal icing, pink sugar sprinkles or pink and white sugar pearls.
Finally, I made name alphabet cookies for the forthcoming bundle of joy – Sage. I used the Sweet Sugarbelle alphabet cookie cutters. Each cookie was flooded with white royal icing and I placed pink sugar pearls in the center of the letter. I added one pink heart candy to each letter. Once that dried, I outlined each letter and dipped the outline in white sugar sprinkles. I also created one banner-shaped cookie and piped on “Oh Baby”, and one heart-shaped cookie.
Congratulations to the Pardos on their growing family!
I have been seeing my massage therapist for a number of years. Chronic back pain has been an issue since my late 20’s and my sessions with her help reduce the pain.
In 2023, she and her husband were expecting their first grandchild. They were hosting a co-ed baby shower at a local brewery, with family and many of the expectant parents’ friends. It was a big guest list.
She asked me if I could make some cookies, and I asked her what kind she wanted. I mentioned my recipe for chocolate sugar cookies, and she agreed on that, along with some sugar cookies. They knew it was a baby girl (lots of pink, please!) who would be named Kallie Jean, and wanted elephant-, onesie-, and plaque-shaped cookies. Here are the cookie cutters:
And here are samples of the sugar cookies after they were baked, and before they were decorated:
I also used varsity letter cut outs (I have these upper case college font in the 4″ size) with the baby’s initials. I decorated them with white royal icing. Once that had set, I outlined each letter and dipped them in bright pink sugar sprinkles. I then added small candy heart decorations from Sweet Tooth Fairy, rose and white royal icing swirls I had made, with a white sugar pearl in the middle.
The elephants were decorated with grey icing (used a very small dab of black in white royal icing to get the grey), with white sugar pearls as the toe nails, and a heart being held at the end of the trunk. Here are some of the cookies mid-decorating:
And here are the elephant cookies fully decorated, with black cookie icing dots for the eyes, white royal icing for the tusk, and the tail and ear piped on after the main body grey had been piped on and set. These versions had small pink sugar pearls for toe nails.
The onesie cookies were decorated in various combinations of white and grey royal icing, as well as pink cookie icing. In addition, a variety of sugar sprinkles and colored sugar pearls were used on some of the cookies.
Finally, the plaque-shaped cookies also had a combination of grey, white, and rose icing. Many of them had a “K” piped on for Kallie, along with some more of the royal icing white and rose swirls that I had created.
The cookies were a big hit, and led to another order for baby shower cookies by one of the guests at the party.
When I’m asked to deliver goodies on a weekday, I definitely use shortcuts like box cake mixes and canned frosting to save time. Baker’s note: to make box cake mixes taste more homemade, I add a tablespoon of vanilla and substitute whole milk for waterwhen mixing the ingredients.
Here are the cupcakes with a variety of designs. The school colors are royal blue and yellow and the mascot is a Lion. I used blue and gold foil cupcake holders. I added small sugar pearls as “golf ball” decorations for many of the cupcakes, as well as blue and gold sugar sprinkles. For some of the cupcakes, I piped green icing around the edges to mimic grass.
I also made candy melt Lion paws in royal blue and yellow to top some of the the cupcakes, with the green “grass” piping around the edge and a large sugar pearl “golf ball” in the “grass”.
Congrats to the student athletes on the golf team, the coaches who support them, and the families and fans who always cheer them on!
Sweet Sweet Muffins 