Elfavated

Last year my aunt and I decorated some kind of awesome elf cookies for Christmas:

They were kind of fantastic.  But this year's elves were on a whole other level:

 

Bake Your Feelings

Baking is a great way for managing a whole bunch of different emotions.

Today I give you two.

1) Guilt.  Here are the cookies and truffles I was guilted into producing for a fund-raising at bake sale at work.  Note: If you don't want to participate in work bake sales, it isn't advisable to post photos of your baked goods on your cubicle wall.

2) Love.  My friends had a baby. She is awesome.  She is, in fact, cute as a button, and her parents were deserving of some cookies to celebrate.

Eat More Cake

By far the most popular thing I have ever produced are Love and Olive Oil's chocolate chip cookie dough truffles.  Co-workers referred to them as crack.  They completely disappeared from S&D's wedding dessert buffet.  So, when they put out a cookbook, I was all over it.  One of the first things I tried were their cookie dough stuffed cupcakes with cookie dough icing - seriously, there is cookie dough beaten into the buttercream.  It was a good thing the recipe only made 12.

baking on the brain

This Hallowe’en, inspired by this post on She Knows, I decided to make little edible brains.  I followed the original concept pretty closely – white chocolate brains filled with cake balls and a red glaze, changing up the cherry jam for a home-made raspberry coulis, and dying my cake grey for truly grey “grey matter.”

Grey cake:

 

Er, I left some frozen raspberries to thaw overnight to make the coulis, and woke up to find what looked like a massacre.  Kind of fitting for bloody brain construction:

Brains:

Blood:

Final products – the damaged ones were even better. This was my kind of project.

Other Hallowe’en sweet treats included owl cookies:

 

Stencilled cake:

Ghost meringues:

 

Sugar cookies: