One more year…. one word to describe it, bittersweet. My daughter Lillie turned 9 years old and we celebrated her birthday with a gymnastics/basketball party.

Let me show you the cake first which features her love and dedication for gymnastics.

Because editing pictures and preparing everything for the blog takes me so much time. The last picture shows you a preview of the cookies. Once I get those ready to post, I’ll show them to you.

I am so excited to share with you the following post.

On April 20th my daughter Lillie participated in another gymnastics meet at Jacobs Gymnastics. This was an all around meet where they compete in all the apparatus – Beam, Floor, Bars and Vault. I had the wonderful opportunity to make cookies for them again.

A few months ago, I made medal cookies only for the Superstars team (the younger girls – Lillie’s team). This time, the older team that competed later that morning got sweet treats also.

Coming up with the design and colors took a little bit of time.  The inspiration for the final design came from all the medals my little Lillie has won over the past couple of years, most of them are stars. The Superstars’ group wear a hot pink with black leotard and no matter what happens, they all deserve a gold first place medal.

Here are the gymnastics medals designs for the April 2013 meet.

The Superstars group is made out of little girls that are 5-7 years of age. I couldn’t resist having these little gymnasts on the cookie. We have one girl balancing on one foot on the beam and another one making the split.

I made only a few medal cookies without a design, but they were the ones that got treated with the real gold color. You may not be able to see it, but they really looked like gold medals! It takes a lot of spray. Every cookie has a pink or red ribbon.

I made one gold medal cookie specially for Lillie.  She was actually worried that there would’t be enough cookies and she was not going to get one. I was laughing inside…. I didn’t say anything though.

 Hot Pink was the main color this time. One of the cookies features a gymnast wearing a colored leotard. I still like the ones with the solid color, but this time they were pink.  You can see my other gold medal cookies here.

And here’s my little All Around Champion.

It’s really getting tougher and the fight for first place gets tighter. All the girls have been improving so much as they get stronger with time. I still see videos and pictures of previous meets and I can see how far they have come. They are just an amazing group of little girls.

Congratulations Sweetheart. We love you so much.

It’s really hard to start talking about how to make cookies or decorating techniques without even sharing with you basic stuff such as a cookie recipe, but I promise I will work on it.

My point is, I won’t get too detailed or technical until I have shown you the basics (eventually).

This quick and short post is about showing you how you can make those medal cookies I created for my daughter’s gymnastics meet.

For now, feel free to use any cookie recipe you know. There’s lots of sugar cookie recipes out there. Even cookie dough from the grocery store might work.

This is all you need. Sugar cookie dough, circle cookie cutter and a straw.

Whether I make 5 or 100 cookies, this is how I make my make ALL my cookies.

Roll the dough inside two sticks of the same thickness to achieve cookies of the same height.

Use your cookie cutter to cut your cookie. Press, but do not remove the cutter yet. Take your straw and perforate the dough close to the top. Twist is a little bit and remove the straw. Now you can remove the cookie cutter.

What happens when you remove the cutter and then make the hole you ask? Well, you make the cookie expand just a little bit, but it was enough to drive me crazy. Don’t do it, but try it if you’d like.

This same idea works perfectly well with ornament cookies for Christmas. Use a pretty Christmas ribbon and hang your edible ornament cookies on your tree.

You see? You got two cookie ideas for the price of one!

I’ll try to make the post better in the future when I’m ready to post useful information such as cookie dough types and icings.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it was useful in any way.

Remember to have One Sweet Treat each and every single day! Thank you for reading!

M