Happy Leap Year - Keroppi Cookie

Happy Leap Year - Frog Cookies & Sanrio Keroppi Cookies

Keroppi is my favorite

You really don't even need cookies cutters to make shaped cookies. Today we cut out the image and put i on the back of a paper plate. The plate had enough was on it to keep oil from bleeding through the cutout.

Totally cheating on the Keroppi cookies. The others were done freehand. You have to be so careful with characters - they need to look just right.

Keroppi Cookies

Frog Cookies

Happy Leap Year Frog Cookies - so random...

I realized I'd have to wait four more years until leap year comes again, and who knows, maybe by then I will be into something else... basketweaving, organic gardening... quien sabe. We talked about how old each of the kids would be in four years. Timmy was so excited, and "I'm going to be seven!"

Smurf Cookie with Royal Icing.

Smurf Cookie "sketch" with royal icing

What do you do when you have extra royal icing and you find a plain cookie??? Practice random designs. You can even seen the marks from the edible ink markers. I'm still trying to learn the best ways to layer royal icing and to use the edible ink markers to help. I only used the marker for his ears and to make the tongue red. If I did it again I would do the pupils in black. Eyes are so challenging... my kids are obsessed with the Smurfs since they saw the movie last year.

This was done on an Easter Egg that never got decorated. Maybe I will make my kids some Easter eggs with their favorite characters.

I did this with the KopyKake, for a really low-budget video of how this works click here.

Easter Cookies

Tray of Easter Cookies for my neighbors

The flowers look nice with the others, but look like Mother's Day to me.

I still haven't made an Easter Egg I love, the problem is I've been trying too much at once.

I didn't make too many bunnies because I thought I wouldn't like the cutter. Once I added the sanding sugar to the tail I was really happy with this one.

Carrots. Julianna added the eyeballs to the first.

Once you start adding eyeballs it's hard to stop.

These were fun, I think I put the eyeballs on upside down. Kids' favorite.

This little guy is my favorite of the day.

All of these cookies were outlined and flooded in royal icing. I will post a tutorial someday. For the little chick, I added the sanding sugar while the flood icing was wet. For the bunnies, I carefully added the sugar to the tail after that was filled in. With the flowers, I flooded and filled, and waited until the next day to outline again and add sanding sugar to the outline. I did these as a practice round and to see which cutters worked and didn't work. I wish I could just stick to one color, it is so much work to do all of this. In the end, there is something so happy about all the different colors and shapes.

I used to buy little baggies of eyeballs from cake supply stores until I realized I could just used left-over royal icing. The icing needs to be medium consistency, not too thick, but not thin, or it will run all over the parchment paper. Just pipe a white circle, then a black one on top. I do this on parchment paper, it's not too slippery but easy to remove once they have dried. If you mess up, no big deal - this is more practice with piping bags.

Lilaloa has a great post on making eyeballs. You can find that here.

Hello Kitty Easter Cookies

Hello Kitty Easter Cookies

I used the KopyKake to help make these. My icing was from a project I did yesterday and it was all falling apart making this very frustrating. I'm not happy with the Wilton meringue powder today and may need to try another brand. Any suggestions?

You can see how I made these on my St. Patrick's Day post.

Don't look to closely these are not perfect

This one was my favorite. I didn't feel like making brown so I used coral for the basket.

Batman Cookie with Royal Icing

Batman Cookie on an over-baked Easter egg

This is the last of the super hero cookies. This one was rushed, so it is not perfect. It's okay to blog about the imperfections? The Easter Egg worked fine, although I would like to spend 5.99 and get the exact oval shape for this cookie.

The first flaw, is the over-baking. No big deal because we were doing these just for fun. So don't bake your sugar cookies to this stage, they taste a little off. Kids don't care, but I can tell a difference. It does something to the flavors. Second flaw, we rushed through this and did not give the black enough time to dry. You can see the black is bleeding into the yellow. Third flaw, the small craters on the right side. My theory about craters - under filling and air bubbles. I usually get these in tiny areas where i spread the icing with the toothpick. To avoid this, I would have to carefully pipe the icing into the spaces using a small tip. The lazy way is to just use a toothpick.

Here are all the super hero cookies, Beccacrocker did the Captain America and she was griping about how it turned out. To her defense, she had 13 house guests that weekend, was making homemade pretzels, a cake and lots of food around the clock. It's okay to do these for fun!

All the super hero cookies

Decorated cookies make little kids so happy. Quick Austin, brush your teeth!

Beccacrocker did a really nice off-center batman on a scalloped square cookie. Too bad I didn't get a better picture of it. As always, prepare the royal icing a couple days in advanced so the grey can turn to black and the dark pink can turn red. The same was true with the dark blue.

Superman Cookies with royal icing using Kopykake 300XK

Superman Cookie decorated with Royal Icing

Superman Cookies were really easy to make with the KopyKake. I didn't have a cookie cutter so I found the image, printed it out and cut out the shape using the dough cutter. For info on making a shape with out a cookie cutter look at this post where I made the ballerina cookie shape using clipart.

Piping with my hand at an angle to avoid shadows

I placed the same image into the projector and used it to pipe a black outline. I want everyone to think I'm some great artist but I'm not. I just followed the lines. The image appears slighlty fuzzy and this would not work in bright light. I had to get used to piping at every angle because your hand creates shadows under the projector.

All Done piping lines

Now let the outline dry, for at least 20 minutes, maybe even overnight.

Can someone say storage hazard?? You can see Becca working hard in the corner.

The technology on this thing is a little 1970s, but it works.

Now the fun part, filling in the colors. Do not under fill or you will get craters when it dries. I did not add enough yellow, see below the craters?

I made the red icing two days in advance and patiently waited for the dark pink to turn into red. I started with deep pink and then added Americolor Tulip Red.

Spiderman Cookies with Royal Icing

Spiderman Cookie decorated with Royal Icing

I'm trying to to let my house get over-run with cookie cutters, so I decided to try to make Spidey on an easter egg shaped cookie. It works, I think. (I must apoligize for the slightly over-cooked edges, somebody didn't get these out of the oven in time, but this was just for fun so oh well.) The most amazing part about this cookie is I piped the details on with my three year old sitting right next to me. Timmy was so happy, "MOM! you're making a SPIDEY cookie." It is not 100% perfect, I don't like the look of the right eye. My next one will be better now that I know how to make these. As to the flavor, I made the red and black in advance so there is not a red-dye aftertaste.

What is the obsession with Spiderman anyways? Well, after watching the movie over 100 times with Timmy I'm a big fan and have tried to do more than just Hello Kitty and pastel colored girl cookies. I think we'll have a Spiderman party before the premier of The Amazing Spider-Man this summer, even though they have a new lead.

So serious, I told him he was Green Goblin eating Spiderman.

This little guy is getting spoiled with my cookie obsession. There were only Hello Kitty cookies left yesterday and he said, "MOM, I can't eat a GRILL cookie!"

Here is the link to The Amazing Spider-Man trailer, if you haven't seen it yet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siqo1X-gKTk

BYU Cookies for a Birthday Party

BYU logo Cookie - Wilton Royal Blue and Americolor Super Black

I spent the weekend with my sister Becca in St. George and we had so much fun with the KopyKake projector. My brother Mike and his family was there for a soccer tournament as well. My nephew Michael was forced into a picking a birthday party theme and chose a BYU party. This was great timing as so many Seniors just found out they were getting into BYU last Friday. So this batch of cookies became a birthday party side dish and a little Congratulations gift for some teenagers that just got accepted into BYU. Logos are fun!!! It's my nerdy perfectionist side that loves making these!! It's so exact and no creativity required.

Different variations of the BYU Cookies.

I think I like the Blue "Y" on the white cookie because there is less dye. The most accurate is the first one shown.

My sister Becca made these.

She said BYU is good at every sport. Becca and her family are a little obsessed with BYU. So she covered them all. The football looks kind of different because we added a bit of cocoa to keep the amount of dye down.

BYU Birthday Cookies

Close up of more of the cookies.

BYU cookies mixed with Sports cookies

Becca made this cake using the projector. It turned out great!

Michael's Birthday Spread

My nephew Joseph and my brother Mike reluctantly eating a cookie

Mike is a professor at BYU and had to ask, "are these cookies licensed...?" maybe not, but I think it's okay because we aren't selling them.

The ugly side of food dye

It is great to do a cookie in the exact color, but the truth is that those dyes are messy. We were all laughing at everyone's blue teeth. I guess the alternative would be to find a way to flood the cookies and use an airbrush so less dye is on each cookie, but that would mean yet another cooking tool.

Alex is so cute I have to ad this. Enjoy the very amateur video.

Hello Kitty St. Patrick's Day Cookies using the KopyKake 300XK Projector

Happy Almost St. Patrick's Day

I made these cookies using a design off of some Hello Kitty St. Patrick's Day cookies. If you haven't noticed I am a huge Sanrio fan. I think Sanrio is right up there with Disney. Someday I'll make all the characters on a cookie. I may be taking this cookie thing a bit far, but I ordered a KopyKake 300 XK to help make cookies. I was going to do a side by side cookie with and without the KopyKake, but I think the one without the projector wouldn't even be worth the sugar. So here's how I made them, I am no artist and almost feel like I'm cheating with this new monster of a tool.

St. Patrick's Day Hello Kitty

Another St. Patrick's Day Hello Kitty

Outline and Flood cookies - Using cheap Ziploc bags and a coupler

We were making so many cookies that we ran out of piping bags and tubes so we used really cheap ziploc bags with a coupler to outline and another bag with a small hole at the end to flood. This makes for a very easy clean-up and is helpful when you just need a little bit of flood icing. I let these dry overnight before adding Hello Kitty.

Outlining Hello Kitty using the KopyKake 300XK Projector

Here I'm using the kopykake to project the image on to the cookie. The lighting in the room was dim so it was fairly easy to see the image. It was a little difficult to get used to putting my hands off to the side so I didn't block the image being projected from above.

More outlining, notice how my hands had to be off to the side

Guiding the icing to create an outline - using P.M.E. 1.5 tip

All the images are outlined, and I'll let them dry for about 15 minutes

Fill with thinner flood icing

To finish, I filled the image with icing and allowed the icing to dry for about 1 hour, just to be safe and to take a breather from the cookies. My sister-in-law Rayanne said this step looked like advanced coloring. It was probably my favorite step, just adding the color to each section. It felt like that dump tool on most paint programs. I didn't take a picture of the last step, but I put the cookie back under the kopykake and added details - eyes, bows, clovers, etc.

The clovers seemed so easy to complete after completing the characters. These were so much fun to decorate!

Very very amateur video using the Kopykake. What is up with my voice? Is my Michigan accent coming through? My sister just started filming.

Another video showing how to use the kopykake to decorate a cookie. What me and my sister Becca do for fun...