Whole Lotta Love

I love Lotta Jansdotter's work.  I have her work stencilled in my kitchen and bathroom.  And a lot of my snail mail is sent with her stickers, in her envelopes. I have her framed postcards up on my wall. Her designs are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.  When I found out that she had a CAKE STAND, I knew that I had to have it.  Even though shipping to Canada was more than the cost of the stand.  And even though my apartment is quickly running out of storage space.  Some things you are meant to have.

Even prettier with a cute little cake on it:

The shipping provider and I have very different opinions on what are considered "convenient" pick-up location and times.  But rather than fight with them, or make a pilgrimage an hour outside of town, I had the parcel redirected to a friend's house, where it could be dropped on the front porch instead of held hostage at the postage centre.  For his trouble and the use of his front porch, I made my friend a little thank you cake:

Forget Me Not

Inspired by the Springsteen cookie project, I tackled another royal icing technique I hadn't done before, and made icing petals that I attached to an already iced cookie, for a 3D effect.  I used Sugar Belle's sugar cookie recipe again, and while the cookies baked, I got the icing ready. I was making forget-me-nots, which are typically purple or blue.  I cut up little pieces of parchment paper and attached them to a flower nail with a dab of icing, which allowed me to rotate the work surface while building the flowers.  GENIUS (not my own, but still...).

 After a few blobby disasters (uh....not pictured), I got the hang of things and made 120 of these little guys in about an hour.

While the flowers dried, I iced the cookies to get a nice, smooth palate.  I realized how much I like the ivory gel-based food colouring from Americolor when doing some of my holiday baking this year, so I tinted the base colour ivory instead of white.  PRETTY.

When the base coat dried I attached the flowers with another dab of royal icing.  EASY!

This cookie project was more than figuring out new ways to play with sugar. The symbol of the Alzheimer Society of Canada is three forget-me-not flowers, representing the person with the disease, caregivers, and society:

At the end of this month I am participating in the Alzheimer Society's fundraiser, Walk for Memories.  If you are interested in sponsoring me, you can do so here.  And if you live in Ottawa, I will give you one of these cookies. It's win-win.

Born to Bake

From the time I was 12 years old I have loved Bruce Springsteen.  I remember an assignment in the 8th grade we had to give a presentation to our class on a song that we loved - Oasis was really popular that year, and a lot of people talked about their song 'Wonderwall.'   I got up and talked about 'Streets of Philadelphia.' When I got a record player in my early 20s, one of my first purchases was the vinyl version of the Springsteen Live 1975-1985 boxed set.  One of favourite memories is seeing Springsteen live in Chicago, and being close enough to the front of the pit that when he held his guitar in the audience during Born to Run we got to touch his guitar.  Between studio albums and bootlegs, I have over 1,700 Springsteen songs in iTunes.

And yet, compared to a lot of his fans, I am fairly tame.  His fan-base definitely puts the fanatic in fan.  However, I've poked around the internet, and I haven't really seen too many Springsteen baking projects, and I've been thinking that I would like to combine these two passions into one amazing project.  When my aunt bought  a Kopykake projector this fall, my vision started to take shape, and today we set about turning an icon into a.....cookie icon.

I started by scouring the internet for images of Bruce that would be simple enough to be a manageable project and easily recreated as a silhouette, while still easily, quickly recognizable as The Boss.  I settled on two - one from the Born to Run photos (and used on the cover of his Greatest hits); the other from the Born in the USA era - both easily recognizable as Bruce, at least to casual fans.

For the Kopykake projector process to work, I knew I needed versions of these images with less detail that would be easier to outline onto cookies.   For the first one, I found a "Born to Crawl" onesie for sale on Etsy that had done a great job of simplifying the image, while "The Bruce Springsteen Songbook" took care of the second one.

Ready to get going, I baked a batch of sugar cookies using blogger Sugar Belle's recipe, because it doesn't need to chill at all, which worked nicely with my impatience.  They were a perfect blank canvas:

Today I brought these cookies over to my aunt's house to use the projector for the cookie magic.  We discussed using an edible ink marker to trace the images onto the cookies, but decided to flood the cookies with white royal icing first, to give us a nice, smooth surface to work with.

We put a fan on them to dry the white icing, while we prepared the black icing...and the Kopykake.  With the images printed and set up inside the projector, it fit perfectly on the cookie, allowing us to outline The Boss with a superfine tip, and then flood with the runnier icing.

The end result?  Even better than I was hoping for.  Seriously.  If Springsteen's lyrics are, as British journalist Sarafraz Manzoor says, a "direct  road to all that is useful, wise and meaningful in life," then these cookies make some good snacks for the road.

Christmas Cookie Blitz

I had big plans for my holiday baking this year. Last year I gave away red and white themed baking boxes that were pretty cute:

Unfortunately, I spent the weekend I had planned to do all that baking re-enacting some scenes from The Exorcist, so I had to smoosh 3 days of colour-coordination, detail-oriented work into a 5 hour post-work baking blitz this week.  All things considered, I was pretty happy:

 

Santa Hat Meringues, inspired by (though not quite as successful as) Haniela's:

  

Old Fashioned Press Cookies:

 

 

 And I'm not sure what to call these....Red Velvet Hugs?  I picked up some minty white kisses with Christmas sprinkles on the bottom, and knew I wanted to make a version of the peanut butter blossom cookies, but with the kiss flipped over so showcase the sprinkles.  I figured red velvet would make a good base, so I used this recipe from Cooking Light, and added the inverted kisses to the hot cookies as soon as they came out of the oven so that they would melt right into the cookies.

  

And lastly, some melted snowmen cookies.  I made some of these a few years ago, after seeing the idea online.  I can't remember where I first saw the idea, but I do know that Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie is responsible for the original genius idea. I decided to use big marshmallows for the heads, because I thought that would be easier.  These cookies were also made in the days before I really knew how to use royal icing, so they were awkwardly covered in some buttercream:

  

What I remember most about those cookies were what a pain making the actual base was.  Freehand cutting out the cookies was annoying.  So, last year when I found this cookie cutter at Ikea (!) I knew that it was born to be a melting snowman (made even easier by using this roll-out sugar cookie recipe from Culinary Concoctions):

 Then I saw a variation of the cookie in a holiday cookie magazine, that used reese cups for the hat and made the whole cookie the snowman's melted head.  When I saw the Reese bell-shaped cups for the holidays, they seemed destined to be snowmen's hats.  Some royal icing for the snow, a few mini chocolate chips for the eyes, and an orange candy-covered nose, and these were super easy to assemble at 1 am, when all best holiday tasks are accomplished.....

 

Branching Out

Before I met my friend Meaghan, I'd made meringues once or twice, but she seriously loves meringues, which is kind of insipiring.  It's nice to make something you can guarantee is going to be well loved.  When she announced her upcoming Christmas party, my wheels started turning, and I decided to make little mini-Christmas trees, complete with Christmas tree light bulb shaped sprinkles.  Too bad the sprinkles don't actually light up.  Still, I declare: SUCCESS.

And as important as it is to treat other people, you also need to treat yourself. So I treated myself to a lovely new bundt pan.  Beauty!