Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!  After a day of family, friends, and waaaaay too much chocolate, I thought I'd share these with you:

I was super lazy super clever this year - The Muffin had a farm-themed birthday party back in February, so I just made extra chicken, duck, lamb, bunny and carrot cookies then, and froze the the ones we didn't use for Easter.  Did you know you can freeze cookies decorated with royal icing?  It freaked me out the first time I tried it (knowing how royal normally disintegrates when faced with moisture), but if you're careful, it can be done!  I even did it with Hallowe'en cookies last year, so I can report success even with black and purple icing!

First, I bagged the cookies in ziplock bags (similar colours together) in a single layer, then placed all the bags inside a plastic box (at this point you can layer the bags carefully on top one of another).  Freeze until the day before they are required (or forget, swear, and get them out a couple of hours before they are required, like I did.  Luckily it was warm today here, so they still thawed in time).  Remove boxes from the freezer and sit them on the bench or sink (NOT in the fridge!!!) until they are Completely Thawed.  Resist the temptation to open the boxes.  Seriously, leave them alone until they're not cold anymore.  Then you can get your delicious cookies out and serve them!  Ours still looked and tasted just as good as they did the day they were made!

We also had cupcakes, decorated with home-made chocolate bunnies:

Oh dear.  This wasn't the most perfect bunny, but it was the one I got a photo of.  Sigh.

Sadly I have never yet successfully managed to temper chocolate, but these bunnies were still yummy - we just had to fridge them until they were ready to hop onto their cupcakey little homes.

Hope you and yours had a fantastic Easter!  Was the Easter Bunny good to you?

Game of Thrones cookies

I'm baaaaaack!

Yes, life got in the way there for a while!  But after quite a long break at my little blog, I've decided I miss it, so I hope there are still one or two of you out there who haven't forgotten me!

So, on to important business:  is everyone excited about the return of Game of Thrones?  I am!  And it got me thinking about Husband's birthday party last year, which he requested a Game of Thrones theme.  It was great fun, and a good time was had by all (even the people who'd never seen or read GoT, thankfully!)  We didn't make them dress up (although we did, of course!), but I did theme all the foods etc, and luckily people really got into it, and enjoyed the chance to - quite literally - share meat and mead with us!

Honestly?  I'm not going to go into the savouries in detail - you'll do much better just heading over to The Inn At The Crossroads for that - suffice to say that the Honeyed Chicken is delish!  I also made Saladhor Sahn's meatballs and eggplant dip, as well as a couple of salads (one from The Inn, one I just cobbled together based on the description in the book).  They were all good.  Sansa's lemon cakes also made an appearance.

But you're here to see cookies, right?  Well, here they are:

Houses Stark, Tully, Targaryen, Frey, Lannister and Martell, respectively.  Various versions of each House's sigil may be found via Google if you're interested in recreating these - pick the ones you like best!

These cookies were made using royal icing transfer method - that is, I piped the sigil designs onto baking paper, allowed them to dry completely, added any edible marker details, and finally lifted them oh-so-carefully onto dry royal-icing-covered cookies.  The watery parts of the Tully and Frey designs were done directly onto the cookies;  just the castles and fish were transferred.  I found this method of decorating to be excellent for these cookies - not only did it make the designs "pop" (as the sigils stood out slightly from the cookie's surface), but it also allowed for a lot more errors while piping these very intricate designs.  I was particularly terrified of moving the Targaryen dragon, and I did break a couple, but in fact the Stark direwolf proved to be more of a problem with its spiky fur and tiny little teeth - I lost more of those than anything else, despite them looking much more sturdy than the dragons!  Go figure.

For those of you who like to have a point of reference, here are a couple of the designs shown on a set of coasters I bought for the party:-

The coasters can be found (among other places) at ThinkGeek.

Anyway, must run for now, but I hope you like these cookies, and that they put you in the mood for this week's instalment!  (now if only George RR Martin would finish the last book....)

May The Fourth Be With You...

Okay, so I'm a little late.

But on the fourth, I was kind of busy.  See, it's not only Star Wars day, it's also my birthday.  And also the birthday of my cousin's teenage daughter.  Since it fell on a weekend this year, we decided to share a party - and make it Star Wars themed!

This was our cake:

I know, he has no legs.  I was originally planning to make legs out of styrofoam and cover them with sugarpaste, etc etc, but time got away from me, and that never quite happened.  Nevertheless (and despite the fact that yes, I am aware his panelling is not absolutely 100% accurate), I am very happy with this little guy.  And with half of him made of Nutella mud cake, and the other half Margarita madeira cake, he was Most Definitely the droid we were looking for...

Oh yes, and there were cookies...

The goodies:

 

The baddies:

 

 Aww, isn't that sweet?  A family portrait...

I should say a quick thank you here to the Completely Amazing Callye of The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle, as my Yoda, Darth Vader and Millenium Falcon cookies are direct copies of hers.  The other designs I figured out myself from photos of the various characters/Death Stars/light sabers.

In case you were wondering, The Muffin helped a little with these - she did Leia's and Han's hair, and also some of the stars.  And the other birthday girl helped out too - she filled in Darth Maul's face with red, and also did the red sections on Boba Fett - her first time with a piping bag!  We gave her a cake cookbook for her birthday after that (can you tell the children in our family are being steadily dragged into my baking obsession?  I Shall Assimilate Them All, mwah ha haaah!  Ahem.) 

I wanted to incorporate some of the more iconic characters from the new(er) movies as well as the originals, as I (as the "old") was dressing as Leia, while the Other Birthday Girl (as the "new") was coming as Padme.  So Amidala and Darth Maul were the obvious choices.  Amidala was a bit of a challenge...

It was very hard to avoid her resembling a Balinese dancer, I'm afraid, but in context at least she was easily recognisable.  Here's the whole gang:

I must say, the most amusing part of sharing this party with my not-so-little-anymore cousin was that she agreed to this party theme Having Never Seen Star Wars.  I am not kidding - I bet most fifteen year old girls are not such good sports!   So during the week before the party, we had her over for a sleepover, so she could stay up until half-past one in the morning watch Episodes Four and One (in that order).  Then she asked for all the spoilers, so in light of the impending party, we gave her a rundown.  She already knew about who Darth Vader is, but was completely (and hilariously) horrified to find out the true identity of Princess Leia...

"WHAT?  NO!  But... but... No, that's just wrong!  But she and Luke make SUCH a cute couple!!"
Too funny.  :o)

And in case you're wondering where I got my Leia costume, I made it!  Who wants to see?

Rainbow Cookies

Here are the cookies I made for The Muffin's birthday party:

Most of these were very simple.  The idea behind the shapes comes, once again, from the Rainbow Magic series of fairy books.  Each fairy has her own colour of fairy dust, which changes into a shape in midair.  Ruby the Red Fairy's dust turns into little red flowers, Amber's turns to orange bubbles, Saffron's to yellow butterflies, Fern's to green leaves, Sky's to blue stars, Inky's to indigo ink drops, and Heather's to violet blossoms.  So most of the cookies are minis, in these shapes and colours.   I wanted to keep them quite simple so that they would be more like, for example, a leaf shape rather than an actual leaf.

The rainbow cookies were made by using a large circular cutter, cutting the circle in half, and adding tiny cloud shapes... like this:

The rainbow stripes were piped on one colour at a time and given time to dry before the next colour was added.  Finally, I piped the clouds on using stiff white icing, to give a nice puffy-textured look to the clouds.  The clouds were also sprinkled with lots of white edible glitter.  I was really pleased with how these turned out, EXCEPT that as you may be able to see, I had huge cratering problems on the coloured stripes of the rainbows.  Oh well, it happens.  And none of the six year olds seemed to mind!  ;o)

Hope you're having a great week - I have been busy with some new Lollybright projects this week, including some very cute hair accessories, so I might have to show you some of those soon!

Ballerina Alice Cookies

So I was a wee bit busy before Christmas, and never quite got around to posting these...

Last year was The Muffin's first year of ballet classes, and for the end of year concert, all the little ballerinas in her class played the part of the "little Alices" in Wonderland (this was part of a larger "Ballet Wonderland" item which spanned several classes and pieces of music - The Muffin's class did the part where Alice has shrunk after drinking from the little bottle).  It was very cute, and we were so proud of The Muffin for going out on that big stage and trying her very best!  She actually did a great job too! (because I am not biased At All).

So anyway, for the dance school's end-of-year party, I baked and decorated these cookies.

They were gone within about five seconds.

So it was a good thing that before the party, the White Rabbit and I had a little picnic first...

We also packaged a few up as a gift for The Muffin's ballet teacher - I thought she was going to cry!  The little ballerina cookies were made to look a bit like the costumes the little girls wore in the concert.  They were also sparkly, which Never Shows Up In Photos.  This is Very Annoying.

I really enjoyed making these cookies;  they were so cute, and (with the exception of the ballerina) they were super easy to make.  Most of the icing was 20-second icing, and all the black details were simply drawn on afterward with a food marker.

Want more Alice goodies?  You could check out my cupcakes from the 2011 Royal Show... Or just type "Alice" into the search field over on the right - we love Wonderland around here!

2012 Royal Show Entries

Once again, The Muffin and I both entered some of our baking efforts into The Perth Royal Show this year.  Here's what we entered...

Cinderella Cupcakes:  I entered these into the "Decorated Patty Cakes"  (ie cupcakes) section - and I won! 

The cupcakes themselves were my usual vanilla recipe (ie Billy Reece's Vanilla Vanilla recipe), frosted with my own vanilla buttercream.  The decorations are almost all sugarpaste (with a little CMC added).  There's a little royal icing to stick everything on, and also a tiny bit of piping on the "glass slipper" - oh, and the wheels of the carriage were lovely piped swirls of royal icing, painted with silver lustre.  But I took these photos after the Royal Show, and sadly the wheels were smashed to tiny pieces by the time I got them home!  So you'll just have to imagine them.

I was quite pleased with my little pumpkin - and it was very easy to do, too - I think with a different colour icing for the base, it would make a lovely Hallowe'en cupcake, too!

And here's a closeup of Cinders herself - she was the most time-consuming to make (unsurprisingly perhaps, although honestly I was expecting to have a lot more grief than I did with the glass slipper, having never made an icing shoe before.  It was easier than I thought it would be).  Cinderella's head and torso (with arms attached) were skewered with a piece of uncooked linguine (I thought spaghetti would not be strong enough to hold this, as it was quite a heavy decoration for a cupcake.  The linguine was a bit thicker and stronger), and left to dry overnight.  Then when it came time to decorate the cupcake, I simply draped a biggish circle of blue sugarpaste over the cupcake for the skirt, added the poofy bits of the skirt on in a slightly lighter blue (please feel free to admire my superior knowledge of dressmaking terms), and added Cinders to the top, pushing the linguine down into the cupcake to support her.

It was a bit of a rush job getting these cupcakes done this year - I just couldn't get inspired, so I ended up leaving it until the day before the delivery day to start making the decorations!  Luckily everything dried sufficiently, and I was happy with them in the end.

Bring on the cookies!  My cookies I was very happy with - no dramas here, I had a clear vision of how I wanted them to turn out, and they did...

Some of you may recognise the Dragon Claw Cookie (top right), and you'd be right - I originally made this cookie design to enter LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition way back in March.  It didn't win then, but guess what?  My cookies DID win at the Show!  Woo hoo!

I also got Second Prize in the "Cake Using Honey" class, but I didn't take a photo of that, because it was pretty boring looking (no icing allowed, etc).  It's a really yummy cake though, and it was based on my Sunny Honey Cupcakes recipe.  If you haven't tried lavender and honey cupcakes yet, then you should totally go and make these immediately - they are really yummy!

As pleased as I am about my Show wins, funnily enough the prizes I was most excited about were two little "Highly Commended" certificates - and they weren't even mine.  Because The Muffin entered two classes this year, and she got Highly Commended for both!  Happy Mummy Dance!  I was SO happy she got this bit of recognition, because she works so hard on her Show cookies, and she's always been so good about saying "I don't mind if I don't win, Mummy - it's fun just entering".  But you know that deep down in her little five-year-old heart, she'd love to win something.

Here are her Decorated Cookies:

I didn't help her at all with these, she did the lot herself, including making the little sugarpaste heart and flower (I did help bake the cookies obviously, but the kids' cookies are not judged on taste, only on appearance - they are even allowed to use store-bought cookies - so the baking part doesn't count in this class).

2012 is Year Of The Farmer, so there were special "Scarecrow" classes this year in every category.  I didn't enter any of these, but The Muffin did enter the kids' special class, which was "Scarecrow Biscuit".  What they had to do was use commercial cookies and lollies to make a picture of a scarecrow, glued down with icing onto a paper plate.  Here is The Muffin's entry:

Congratulations, Muffin!  Your Daddy and I are both so proud of you!

Let The Games Begin!

Over the last couple of weeks, The Muffin has been incredibly excited about the approach of the Olympic Games.  She noticed all the products packaged in green and gold at the supermarket a few weeks ago, and wanted to know what all that was about.  So I explained to her what the Olympics were, and mentioned they were coming up soon, and expected that to be the end of it.

But I had not reckoned on Pre-Primary.  Over the past week, her class has been learning about the Olympics, and I swear she's now teaching me stuff.  It's fantastic;  they've made Olympic torches, gold medals, pictures of the Olympic rings, and more!  So now she is SUPER excited, has announced that next Monday we will be having an Olympic-themed muffin tin, and couldn't wait to see the Opening Ceremony.

So I thought I'd whip up a simple little treat for us to eat while we watched.  Now I know this isn't an original idea, but it is very simple, and lots of fun - The Muffin loved it.  She claimed the Silver.

How to make Oreo Olympic Medals

1.  Grab a packet of Gold Oreo cookies (in Australia I have only found these at Coles;  Woolworths didn't have them)

2.  Brush each cookie with lustre dust in either gold, silver, or bronze.

3.  Cut some fruit leather straps into thin strips and arrange on a plate.

That's it!

This picture shows the shine a little better:

So what did you think of London's Opening Ceremony?  (my personal favourite bits were Rowan Atkinson playing the piano during "Chariots of Fire" - hilarious - and also the very different lighting of the flame). 
And are your kids excited about the Olympics?

Mini-Beast Cookies

This term at pre-primary, The Muffin's class has been studying "mini-beasts" (ie. all the little insects, spiders, snails, worms, etc that live in the garden).  To celebrate the end of term, they had a little party.  Each child dressed as their favourite mini-beast, and brought a plate of food to share.  The Muffin and I decided to make mini-beast cookies!

The Muffin actually helped a lot with these;  she did most of the caterpillars herself, plus the purple bits on the snails, and the pink bits on the butterflies (she suggested "let's use the wet-on-wet technique for these spots, Mummy!"  Hilarious.  She's five.)

We had lots of fun doing these together, and I hear the class had lots of fun eating them!

Shortbread Cookies for Mothers Day

I had been wanting to bake something for Mothers' Day, but I just wasn't sure what.  We had planned to have my mother over for morning tea, which was also going to double as breakfast for me.  Husband was making pancakes, and I was serving (store-bought) mini croissants, so I didn't want to bake cupcakes or anything that would be too substantial.  Just something light and small and gorgeous.

Then I found this recipe over at Sweetapolita.  It is a cupcake recipe, and it looks amazing, but the bit I was really interested in this time was her topper:  little lemon and lavender shortbread cookies.  Hurrah, I thought.  That's what I want.  A short search of my pantry revealed that I had run out of dried lavender, and that despite a quite bewildering number of limes on our trees, there was not one ripe lemon to be had.

This was nine pm the night before Mothers' Day.  Procuring extra ingredients was not an option.

So I improvised.  Instead of the tablespoon of lemon zest and teaspoon of lavender, I opted for the zest of just one lime (I was going for subtlety), a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste, and just a whiff of rose...  I also decided to add some rice flour - I love that sandy texture it gives shortbread, and I know my mum does too.

The end result was delicious.  The flavour is very subtle - if you want to actually be able to taste the rose flavour properly, you might want to up the quantity (or perhaps dust the cookies with some rose-scented icing sugar just before serving - that would be pretty).  As it stands, the rose just adds a little bit of complexity to the flavour, without actually being noticeable.

I made mini cookies for us to eat on the day, and larger ones to package up and put in with Mum's present (I added a royal icing and sanding sugar centre to those ones, too).

I'd still like to try Sweetapolita's recipe in its entirety once I get hold of some more lavender - but for us today, these were perfect.

Vanilla-Lime Shortbread Bites (adapted - slightly - from Sweetapolita)

Ingredients

230g butter
60g icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla paste (or the seeds from a vanilla pod)
Zest from one large lime (or two small ones)
About six drops of rosewater essence (or a little more if you want to really taste it - but don't overdo it)
190g  Plain flour
50g  cornflour
25g rice flour
1/4 tsp of salt (if you're using unsalted butter.  Otherwise, just a small pinch)

Modus Operandi
Beat butter on medium speed until smooth.  Add icing sugar and beat for two minutes. Beat in vanilla, zest and rosewater essence.  Add flours and salt and stir until all incorporated.
Wrap the mixture in plastic and chill it for at least an hour - seriously, at least.  This mixture is very short, and it's very squishy.  When firm enough, roll it out between two sheets of baking paper.  Cut into pretty shapes, and chill them again on the baking tray (or freeze them as I did), before baking at 180 degrees Celsius for around 10 minutes (until they don't look wet anymore, and are just beginning to turn pale golden at the edges).

Oh, and Happy Mothers' Day, to all the mums out there - but especially to mine.  Love you!

Dragon Claw Cookie

This is my very last (and very last-minute!) entry to LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition.

It's funny - this was actually my very first idea.  I looked at the shape and said, "It could be someone holding something" and Husband said "Ooo - someone holding an iPad!".  Which I thought would be a little weird.  But then I said "Oh! A dragon - and it could be crushing a book in its claws!"  (cause you know, that's not weird at ALL).

So this is what I ended up with.  I would have liked to add a bit of dark shading into the dragon's joints, but I have officially run out of time!  (Maybe I'll try this later - if I do and it looks better, I'll post another pic just for interest's sake).

If you haven't checked out the competition over at LilaLoa yet, you really really should - there are some amazing entries!

Snow White Cookies

The Muffin and I decided to decorate some cookies just for fun on the school holidays. I let The Muffin choose the cutters she wanted (girly girly ones of course), and then she had a good idea: "Mummy let's each choose a Princess and do that theme of cookies!" She (predictably) chose Cinderella, but I'd been looking for an excuse to try out my new mini apple cutter, so I chose Snow White.

As it was mainly an activity for The Muffin to enjoy, I let her have most of the control over shapes etc, which meant I only got two: a couple of dresses, and a whole lot of apples! Here's what I came up with:

Poisoned apple, anyone?

No, no, Snow White - don't eat it...!

Oh... too late.

Interestingly, these cookies were all decorated exclusively with 20-second icing (normally I'm an outline-and-flood girl). I loved the way the 20-second icing worked for the sleeves on the Snow White dress - made them nice and puffy. Also the apples. I think 20-second icing is definitely the go for these little mini cookies, and it just goes to show that it can be used to flood and add detail to a larger cookie if you are feeling lazy in a hurry (the red detailing on the front of the bodice was still 20-second icing - I just used a #1 tip after the main part of the dress had more or less dried). The slashes on the sleeves were done using the wet-on-wet technique.

And if you're wondering, here are the cookies The Muffin decorated:

You can't see it, but her dress was all sparkly - you know, from the Fairy Godmother's magic.

It was a fun day!

Easter Fun

Okay, so I know Easter is all over and done (apart from the enormous mountain of chocolate currently residing in our cupboard. Wow.), but before we kiss it goodbye entirely, I thought I'd share a few things we did to celebrate on Sunday...

Coloured Eggs

Sure, everybody colours eggs for Easter, right? But we do it a little differently...

We used to do it the normal way (ie boil eggs, then soak in food colouring to colour the shells), but we found that little hairline cracks in the shell would usually cause skanky-looking coloured bits on the egg itself inside, and sometimes there was actual coloured water hiding in there as a nasty surprise for the person who cracked it open (because we colour our eggs to eat, not just to look at). When, a few years ago, my friend's small son ended up with indigo-coloured water running down his arms, I thought to myself, There Has To Be A Better Way.

So then it occurred to me that it's really the shell causing the problem - and Who Needs The Shell, Anyway? So now when we dye eggs, we hard-boil them, shell them, and then dye them. And after just a minute or two (way quicker than dyeing eggs with shells), they look like this:

Aren't they pretty?

And the best part is, it means you don't have to feed people just a whole boiled egg (which is, let's face it, kinda boring) - instead, you can halve them, scoop the yolks out and make a yummy filling to pipe back in...

And they're still pretty!

Sweeties

We had cookies (which I've already posted separately, but here they are on the platter):

Quick & easy chicky cupcakes (with Starburst Chew beaks, which incidentally are So Yummy! - I hadn't had them before):

And The Muffin and I also made some of these M&M birds (this fantastic idea is from Callye at The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle - she did them with sugar almonds as well - so cute, and so very easy!)


The Muffin's Dinner

After all the festivities, none of us wanted a proper dinner, but I wanted The Muffin to eat something halfway decent too, so when she asked for "a cute chicken themed Easter bento", I thought sure, why not?

She had a cheese & Vegemite sandwich cut into three pieces: an Egg With Legs, and two mini chicks. The chicks have black sesame seed eyes, and one of them is just hatching out of a chocolate egg (against my better judgement. But it was out of The Muffin's present stash, so she would have eaten it eventually anyway, and it was Easter, after all). The Egg With Legs has the cheese legs painted with a tiny bit of orange food colour, and icing eyes. There are also spinach leaves, cashews, and grapes.
I'm linking this meal to Bento Of The Week over at Bento Blog Network.

Hope everyone's Easter was as fun as ours - how did you spend yours?

Lion Cookie

You remember my little Giraffe cookie? Well now he has a friend.


They enjoy walks through the jungle, and hanging out on the African Savannah. Oh yeah, and they always try to take time to eat smell the flowers...

I wonder if they will make any more friends one day?

Oh yeah, and little Leo is my latest (and last, for now!) entry into LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition. I do have more ideas, so maybe I'll come up with another entry or two later in the month, but that's all I've got for now! You can see my other entries here, here, here and here- or just check out everyone's entries over at LilaLoa.

Flower Cookie

A Flower for the cookie competition over at LilaLoa:

The Muffin looked at this and said, "Is it meant to be a sunflower?" I answered quite truthfully that I really didn't know what sort of flower it was meant to be, I just sort of let the cookie show me what sort of flower it wanted on it.

Giraffe Cookie

Another entry for LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition!

Isn't he cute? Little munchy giraffe looks happy, but maybe a bit lonely... does he need some friends?