Last weekend, I baked and decorated holiday “stained glass” cookies with two friends. The stained glass comes from crushed & melted lifesavers in each cookie window. (Thanks to William-Sonoma for the recipe!)
Of course half the fun of making cookies is eating all the broken ones. 
I wasn’t too careful at my decorating station. *lol*
It was hard to believe we made so many in such a short amount of time! Here are even more…Man – just looking at these gets my tummy rumbling. heehee
December 10th, 2009
After our adventures in buttercream, my friend Mimi & I decided to give fondant & royal icing a try.
Believe it or not, this cake is only 3.5″ around!
We baked chocolate sheet cakes and then used large biscuit cutters to cut out the tiers. We torted them and then added the fondant along with some piped royal icing. The small flowers were made with fondant cutters, and the rose petals were individually shaped & put together like you’d do with polymer clay. We added a little bit of edible shimmer with Wilton pearlescent dust. I gave this one to my new neighbor as a “welcome to the neighborhood” gift!
Am loving the mini-desserts right now…all the fun without all the calorie guilt. (well maybe a lil’ calorie guilt – but that’s what elliptical machines are for!) *lol*
October 17th, 2009
My friend, Mimi, and I recently took a Wilton 101 cake decorating class at our local craft store. We learned basic piping skills, how to make buttercream icing and how to turn it into a festive celebration of sugar…or so we thought.
I decided to test out my skills on my co-workers, and learned a few important things:
Lesson #1: When the package says the icing colors are highly concentrated…you should believe it. Otherwise, you just might end up with alien green & florescent pink. *lol*
Lesson #2: Cake decorating is just like papercrafting…when you have an accident, you cover it up with an embellishment or decide it was a “design decision” and turn it into something else entirely.
After baking my first 8″ cake, I was attempting to frost it with thick icing & it quickly began to crumble away. Left with a divet the size of a baseball, I decided it was time to get creative. So I lopped off a fourth of the cake and turned it into this…
Any guess as to what it is? One of my co-workers said…”oh, it’s the Eiffel tower, right?”. Hmmm…not exactly what I was going for, unless you consider it in a Picasso-esque modern art kinda way. *lol*
So what was it supposed to be? Did you guess?
Yes – a purse. See the buckle & knobs on bottom? Though you can’t see it in this pic, there was a handle on top too. The HB2U is a happy birthday sentiment tag message. I mean you see purses like this in bright green & pink on the street, right? 
Lesson #3: Tiered cakes are really hard to transport already assembled. I made a second mini-tiered cake in addition to the purse one using 6″, 4″ & 3″ rounds. The good news is – it didn’t crash & burn in the car…but I had it carefully perched in a cardboard box with several wood dowels supporting the insides. I used up the rest of my nuclear icing and added my co-workers’ name to the front (professional, eh?) *lol* Though it may look a little frightful, they were both pretty tasty in the end!
October 12th, 2009
