Citrus Cookies

I made these cookies for a party a few weeks ago and they turned out great! I added some lime zest to the cookie dough and substituted a little vanilla for lime juice. I also used lime juice in the icing, which really brought out the lime in the cookies.

Citrus Sugar Cookies
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla plus the zest of a lemon, orange or 2 limes

1. Whisk together the flour and salt in a medium bowl and set aside
2. Cream together the butter and sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the egg, citrus juice and vanilla (and zest if you're using it) and mix until blended
3.Gradually add the flour mixture to the butter mixture until the two are thoroughly blended
4. If you want to color the cookies, you can add food coloring now
5. Refrigerate the dough for at least half an hour (I usually divide the dough in half, shape them into disks and wrap them in plastic wrap so they cool quicker. I found it's easier to just roll out one disk at a time so the other can stay cool in the refrigerator.)
6. Roll and cut out the cookies. (I like to roll out the dough between two sheets of parchment or wax paper instead of dusting the counter with flour. It's a lot easier to clean up and then if you need to roll out the dough several times, the cookies won't get too tough. I also like to line the cookie sheets with parchment paper or silicon baking mats, which makes it a lot easier to get the cookies off the pan)
7. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bake for 12-16 minutes. (The cookies will keep their shape better if you put the cut cookies in the refrigerator while the oven preheats.)
8. Cool the cookies before icing them.

For the icing recipe, use the royal icing recipe here and substitute lime, lemon or orange juice for half of the water.

Cake Quilt

I made this wall hanging for a raffle prize for Capitol Confectioner's Day of Sharing. I made up the pattern, based on this picture. I haven't uploaded my pattern for it yet so just let me know if you'd like it and I can post it. Thomas took a few different pictures, which you can see here.

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July! I had some extra buttercream icing and I just got new star punches at the San Antonio Day of Sharing last week that I couldn't wait to try out! I tried striping the piping bag with food coloring to make the border. It turned out cute! Click here to see more pictures.

More Cookie Fun

I have been having way too much fun with my new cookie books: Cookie Craft and The Flour Pot Cookie Book. Of course, this meant I got cookie cutter fever, so here's my new cookie cutters!

Most of my ideas came from Cookie Craft, although I did try some cookies with fondant. Thomas & I both agree that we prefer the taste of royal icing to fondant with the cookies, but there are some neat things you can do with fondant. Here's a link to my Picasa Album with the rest of my cookie pictures.

Peanuts Cookies

First bake your cookies. I used my Chocolate Cutout Recipe.

Next, I put a sheet of wax paper over my Peanuts template and traced the outlines with a tip 1 and royal icing.

Once the outlines are dry, you can fill them with thinned royal icing. If there are any holes you can use a toothpick to fill in the hole. Just make sure to do it quickly because royal icing dries pretty fast.

Let the characters dry overnight. If it's humid, you may need to let them dry for a day or two. Once the characters are dry, you can use food safe markers to add faces and details.

Once the details have dried, you can start icing your cookies. Since royal icing dries quickly, you'll want to do one cookie at a time. I find it's easier to put the royal icing in a piping bag and draw an outline, then fill it in.


Next, peel off your character from the wax paper and place it on your cookie. Since the are a little delicate, it's safest to use the edge of a table to pull the paper away.


Enjoy!

Snail Cake

Yesterday, I took a cake sculpting class at All In One Bake Shop and it was a lot of fun! Mostly because I love cake and snails so the combination is pretty awesome.

This is my first sculpted cake. I was glad to find that it's not as hard as it looks!

Tom's Bee-Day Cake

Here is the cake that I made for my father-in-law's birthday. I found a bee and bee hive cookie cutter that I thought might be nice to use for his birthday cake but realized it would be much cuter in 3D:

I made the bees out of gum paste and put them on wire so they could fly.

Here's their bee hive. It's made out of fondant and I added African violets made out of royal icing.

I used the bee cookie cutter to add bees to the side of the cake.

This is my first attempt at painting on a cake so I think it turned out reasonably well.