Archive for Cookies

Dessie is one of my super duper best friends and her lovely daughter Gabbie (Lillie’s super duper best friend) celebrated her 6th birthday at the Des Moines’ zoo last weekend.

Part of the party package includes having the children learn and interact with two animals from the zoo, of course some of the friendly critters. They actually bring them to the room for the kids to see and touch. Gabbie choose to have a turtle and a hedgehog at her party and I decided to add another cute critter to the pack.

When Dessie asked me to take care of her treats this year, I absolutely agreed.

The hedgehog cupcakes are chocolate with buttercream icing.

Then we have some turtles on strawberry cupcakes (Gabbie’s favorite flavor). sitting on a combination of soft yellow and white buttercream icing.

And my addition to the critter set, a sweet fox. Maybe I should have made a red panda since they have one at the zoo. She looks cute (I think).

We also made sugar and brown sugar cookies for party edible favors.

After making these cookies I thought that maybe the fox should have been smelling some pretty flowers instead of a tree with barely any leaves left on the branches. Opps…

The hedgehog walking on grass…

And the turtle swimming in water, sort of… yes, no?

I think I made over 60 chocolate decorations and used them on both the cupcakes and the cookies as you could see.

Gabbie was very happy with her treats and I was delighted to hear to see her pretty happy birthday face.

We love you sweetheart… Happy Birthday!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a joyful New Year. Now it is back to the usual routine right? Well, Valentines Day is coming up soon.

I simply had NO time to write about the Christmas cookies we made this year (I blame the kids for it). Instead, and I hope it is only this one time, I’m showing them to you in a couple of collages. Better late than never uh?

First, lots of Christmas Houses (aka very time consuming cookies).

 And the rest of the cookies.

So here you go. Whooosh… I feel much better now.

I think overall we made over 150 cookies easily and it was a lot of fun.

You can always see more pictures (and bigger) on the cookie gallery (starting on page 9).

This post is about my son Noah who turned 3 years old back in December.

My son is just like his daddy in a scary way. He is absolutely in love and/or obsessed with Batman, Spiderman and Transformers (especially Bumblebee). His favorite animals are lions, tigers and Dinosaurs (by far). Believe me, he can be a combination of all of them at the same time. He is a true/real boy. He has been able to sit and watch the Jurasic Park movies since he was 2. But it’s all in phases.

A month ago it was ALL about Bumblebee from the Autobots. Trust me, I don’t know the lingo. The only reason I know that ‘big’ word Autobots is because of my husband, the sci-fi geek.

Anyway, since Noah was all about the Transformers I decided to make him cookies of his favorite characters.

Optimus Prime

And both of them.

I’ve never seen him more excited to see my cookies. The sleepless night was all worth it.

We made enough cookies to take to his music class. He looked so happy carrying a basket of cookies for his little friends at Kindermusik and his teacher Miss. Molley.

Happy Birthday darling!

I am way behind on posting and updating the blog. I have many Fall cookies to show you, but I haven’t gotten the chance to edit the pictures to write the post.

Christmas is right around the corner and it’s my favorite theme for decorating cookies. Christmas cookies can be so fun and colorful and because there is a huge amount of cutters out there, the possibilities are endless.

Here are some cookies I made for my daughter’s Godfather’s mom’s nieces and nephews. Did you follow that? I even got confused writing it (I hope it is correct).

These bears look like they had too much pumpkin pie during Thanksgiving!

One of these houses is ours. Trust me, we don’t have any more beautiful flowers in front of our window.

It’s weird to be posting Christmas cookies before my Fall cookies, but I guess I still have time since winter is not here yet (although it feels like it already here in Iowa).

Have a Sweet Treat today!

Everyone knows the birds… the angry birds that is, except me.

They seem to be very popular birds because I see their pictures everywhere, but I honestly don’t know what’s going on with them.

We do own the movie Rio and it is one of our favorites right now.  I think it is one of the cutest movies of all especially when we watch it in Spanish, it is so funny (I haven’t seen it in English to be honest). My sister Crystal tells me that the birds are from the movie and other people have told me that they are the birds of an online game.

Why do they call them Angry Birds anyway when they look so cute?

Just in case that there’s actually someone out there (besides me) who is not familiar with these popular characters, here they are.

My nephew Axel was obsessed with Mario Bro’s last year and this year he seems to be a huge fan of the popular birds. My sister asked me to make a few cookies featuring the angry birds for Axel. So here they are.

The cookies are sugar cookies and the images are made out of chocolate.

I was very happy with the way the chocolate images turned out, but to me the cookies looked a bit mmmh… naked (?). I thought they needed something else to fill the empty space, or maybe I made the cookie a little bit too big.

Anyway, my sister said that Axel was very excited when he saw the cookies and that makes me happy.

We again had the opportunity to make treats for one of my favorite family events, Kindermusik’s Fall Family Music Night. It was only appropriate to make spooky treats since the event was held on Saturday 29th, just before Halloween.

Here are some of the cookies we prepared for them this year.

I’m not a huge fan of candy corn (although I can eat a few of them without complaining), but I love how they turned out in cookies.

I love this cookie because it is so versatile and I can make for pretty much every occasion.

The next one was also one of my favorites. I don’t have the spider web cutter, but the circle cutter worked. I wish I would have made it in different colors. The spiders (on the webs) look more like mmh… ticks (yikes!). I’ll fix that next time.

My mom loved this particular cookie design. Eye catching uh? It made a few people wondered how we made that.

I love these friendly creatures. Adorable and cute ghosts.

What’s Halloween without some witches? Here we have the boots/leggings and the hats. Maybe I’ll work on the entire body next year.

And just to make it spooky enough for the little ones…

I was never happy with the “B”… I just couldn’t get it right.

The family night was a lot of fun. It was all about sharing a music night with the whole family and learning while doing it.  Let me share the experience with you if you have never been to one of them.

Parents and children gather in a spacious room with the very awesome and talented Jenn Horak leading everyone on a musical journey of fun and games. Jenn either plays music or sings to everyone to make kids become active while they jump, sing, dance and share musical instruments.  They may not know it, but children are learning and developing other skills (social, musical, and more).

Caregivers become active too! Grown ups get to participate along with the kids on this musical event as they also get to sing and dance with their little ones.

If you are interested or just curious about Kindermusik, visit their website. My children have benefited tremendously from this learning experience and I’m sure yours will too. My son Noah is almost 3 years old and he absolutely looks forward to Saturdays for his music classes.

We got very positive feedback from the cookies we made this year. I just feel bad that I ran out of them  in the end!

Check out last year’s event here.

Enjoy a sweet treat every day!

I should have done the following cookies about a month ago, but something always got in the way. No, I wasn’t being lazy….

My daughter Lillie just started Kindergarten this year (sniff) and she’s in the hands of a couple of wonderful teaches. I wanted to bake something special for them. Apples for teachers, appropriate right?

Granny Smith Apples

Red Delicious Apples

 I had so many ideas and plans but because I wasted so much time, I ended up with some very simple treats for them… apples!. I placed about 5 of them them in a very cute plate that I found at Target and wrapped them with clear plastic.

I know I could have done better (maybe some pencils, notebooks, erasers, etc.), but I’ll do better for them for the Holidays.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m planning on a couple of shows at the end of October so many sweet treats are coming.

I finally got a chance to post this. This post really did take me a lot of time to get it done. Here it is…

The love of my life (one of them) turned 5 years old on July 4th (sniff). It breaks my heart to see her grow up, but she is turning out to be this wonderful little lady (with a sassy attitude) and I couldn’t be more proud of her.

For some reason, something almost always goes wrong whenever I make cakes for my family and I tend to be very unhappy with the end results. However, this year I was happy with Lillie and Noah’s cake.

Lillie decided to have a Scooby Doo party for her 1st birthday party (yes, she had a few). So Scooby Doo it is!. They have both become very big fans of the lovable Great Dane.

I was soooo busy with all the party details that these are the only pictures I managed to get of her cake (… bad ones).

The cake design is meant to be Scooby Doo’s collar with his doggy tag. Velma, Shaggy and Scooby himself were part of the topper. We had chocolate butter cake as the main cake, vanilla bean buttercream for the filling and it was covered in fondant.

I made a lot of sugar cookies and added the chocolate images, doggy bones and some funky colorful flowers. I couldn’t get better pictures being in such a rush.

 … and some chocolate and fondant details of the cake.

Here are only few of the pictures of Lillie’s friends having fun breaking the pinata and waiting for cake. Friends, you might see some of you out there too.

Overall we had a pretty good, but windy day. We had to leave sooner than we wanted because rain and lightning were fast approaching.

Thank you very much to all our wonderful friends for making the day extra special for our children. Out of the three parties she had, she really enjoyed this day the most. If you weren’t there, we missed you!

Thank You again from my little bakers.

Oh, just to answer someone’s question… we celebrated Noah’s birthday too because I never organized his party back in December. I know, shame on me.

I think most people are familiar with The Cat in the Hat books by Dr. Seuss. Well, this cake is about Thing 1 & Thing 2 and in case you don’t know them here they are.

I don’t really remember reading the books when I was a little girl, but now that I have my children I’m finally familiar with them. They even have the books in Spanish!

The story on the cake is about a couple of little ones celebrating their birthday, I believe on the same day (if not only days close). My client liked a pair of matching cakes I had made in the past on Monster’s Inc. where one is bigger than the other one. So this Dr. Seuss cake is bases on that idea.

Here’s the cake for 2 boys, one turning 5 years old and the other one celebrating his 1st birthday. 

Thing 1 & Thing 2

There’s a lot of details to show on the cakes. Here’s Thing 2 designed for Drake, the little brother.

Thing 2 and the always looking frightened fish

Thing 1 went to Quinn, the older brother.

Thing 1 with a flying kite

 Here are some of the details on the cakes. You have balloons, popular faces and that always worried looking fish. 

We also prepared sugar cookies for them. The images are made out of chocolate and placed on top of the cookie to give them a ‘dimensional’ look to them. 

Green Eggs & Ham

The Famous Dr. Seuss Hat & Fish

The Famous Dr. Seuss Hat & Fish

 I’m sad to report that I forgot to take a picture of the actual Dr. Seuss cookie, I did actually make one or two.

I think this set of cakes and cookies are some of my favorite ones ever. I love the fact that the chocolate pieces on the cookies look actually alive (! ? !).

I have been participating on this event for the past couple of years. I’m talking about the Family Music Night offered by Kindermusik.

This event is always open to families of all ages that are interested in having an amazing time around music, fun activities, crafts, and much more.

Anyway, back to the treats right? My mom and I made lots of treats for the event. I always try to bake something different to the event, but our cookies have to be there. Here are some of the pictures.

Easter Cookie Tray

 Cookies inpired by candy & chocolate.

Eggs and Peeps

Robin Eggs' Cookies

Pink and Yellow Peeps

Yellow & Blue Peeps

We always bring cake to the events and that day was  no exception. Here we have Lemon Cake soaked in lemon syrup and frosted with a simple lemon frosting. We made cookies looking like limes, lemons, oranges, kiwis and my favorite fruit… watermelons. 

Spring Fruit Cookies

Mini Chocolate Cake cupcakes.

Chocolate mini cupcakes with ganache

Mini cupcakes with chocolate frosting

We made our Cake Balls in Chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, Caramel cake with Dulce de Leche buttercream & White Butter cake with vanilla frosting. They are all covered in a light sugar glaze.

Easter Cake Balls

Personally, having my children enrolled in Kindermusik since they were babies has been one of the most wonderful experiences I can give them. They have gained so many skills not only music, but developmental skills.

If you are interested in learning more about Kindermusik, you can email at info@piedpiperstudios.org  or call 515-221-2948.