Love is a Mix Tape (Cookie)

I'm not really a joiner - and I generally avoid group activities.  But during university I was part of a pretty fantastic club.  It was a mix tape club - there were three of us who got together every few weeks, hauled all our CDs to one person's giant stereo, and painstaking recorded a mix tape based on a theme.  Even though my music collection is mostly digital these days, I still have a little stereo that will play cassette tapes, and my entire collection of our club's mixes.

I've wanted to make mix tape cookies for a long time, and earlier this year I did a random search for a cassette tape cookie cutter, and FOUND ONE.  Not only did it exist, but it was reasonably priced - and I even found a store that shipped to Canada for less than my university tuition. Sometimes the Internet is really awesome.

 I knew that I wanted the cookies to be black, so that I didn't have to cover them with black royal icing, which is okay when use sparingly, but doesn't really taste the greatest.  My online hunt pulled up some recipes that used black onyx cocoa powder, but the stores that selling it had really expensive shipping.  Sometimes the Internet is disappointing.  I eventually tracked down a spice store in Newfoundland selling what they called black cocoa - it arrived last week, and it's......not exactly black:

 I decided to just use it anyways, with a bit of the black food colouring added to this recipe from Suppers at Sunset.

Cookies and decorating:

Our mix club was called My So-Called Mix Tape Club (can you tell we came of age during the 90s?)

 We had a few really good themed tapes, but the group's favourite was probably "10 years / 10 minutes" - Side A were our newest favourite songs that we had liked for "10 minutes" and Side B were songs we had loved for a really long time (and when you are 22 years old, a long time is 10 years).

 Few people have captured the emotional resonance of a mix tape better than Rob Sheffiled in his book, Love Is a Mix Tape.  Read it. Seriously. "The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”

Mix tapes are road trips, and seasons, and moments in time.

And now mix tapes are cookies.

Talk About a Dream, Try to Make It Real

Like Springsteen, I believe in the Promised Land - mine just involves baked goods.  My Bruce cookies from earlier this year came pretty close.  And my mind has been racing (in the street) ever since.  I had ideas for more Boss-themed cookies and cake - I just needed a few special tools.  Lucky for me, my mother is a creative - and generous - genius.  And she is probably regretting the day she said that with enough time and the right tools you can do anything.

She started making her own cookie cutters last year, using pliers to bend a circular metal cookie cutter into other shapes.  She made me the anatomical heart cutter I used for this year's Palentine's.  In December, I emailed her and asked if she could make me a Springsteen silhouette cookie cutter.  When I didn't hear back from her, I sent a follow-up email to see how it was coming along - apparently she thought I was joking.  I never joke about Springsteen.  The design I wanted was too complicated for the size of cookie cutter she had been working with; so, I ordered her a refill kit for a "build your own cookie cutter" kit.  She had the tools - just needed the time. Et voila:

While custom cookie cutters are a newer talent, my mom has been stencilling for as long as I can remember, and while I was waiting for my cookie cutters to be produced, it dawned on me she could probably make some custom cake stencils - so I sent off some more requests of iconic Springsteen imagery, and last week I picked up the finished products, which, used with a simple chocolate cake and some icing sugar, result in THIS: