Color Mist Cookies

My brother, Ben, had his first holy communion this past weekend.  He looked incredibly handsome in his suit and white tie.  He loves to dress up.  When my mom asked him if he wanted to wear his older brother's tie from last year he said no, he wanted a new one.  Not only did he want a new one, but he wanted to go to the store and help her pick one out.  Not what you would expect from an 8 year old boy!

I knew I wanted to make cookies that would look as good as he did.  It would also be nice if they didn't take forever either, this whole moving to Texas 'thing' is kind of time consuming!  Here's what I ended up coming up with:

Well, I came up with the ones in the middle anyway.  My Aunt made the chocolate covered oreos, peanut blossoms, and puff pastry/lady lock type cookies.

I liked the blue and yellow colors together, and the absolute best part is how easy these cookies were to make!

Start by making your favorite sugar cookie recipe in what ever shape you prefer.  I found squares worked best for these designs for reasons I'll get into later.

Then go ahead and outline and flood your cookies with white royal icing.

Don't forget to pop any air bubbles ->

Once the icing has dried the real fun can begin!  To decorate the cookies I used color mist sprays I found at the local craft store.  I found mine cheaper than what they are listed for on Amazon, and was able to use a 50% of coupon, yay for saving money! 

There were two different designs I had seen floating around the Internet that I wanted to give a try, the first was gingham cookies at Glorious Treats and the other was simple but elegant ombre cookies at Sweet SuagrBelle. 

Today I'll show you the Gingham and then later this week the Ombre.  Both were easy, but took a couple tries to get right.  And they took a lot less time than any design with royal icing would have taken!

Ok, I would recommend picking a shape that allows you to cover the entire top of the cookie with icing.  Since I had a trim of plain cookie showing around the icing I was concerned about the dye from the spray showing up on the cookie (especially when using the blue).  So the first thing I did was to take some oak tag and rip it up into four strips (So that each piece had a straight edge) to cover the exposed cookie parts. The square shape obviously was the easiest shape to cover all the exposed areas.


You'll also want to cover your entire table with newspaper, just in case!




Once your cookie is safe with all the parts you don't want dyed hidden away you're ready to get started!

To make the gingham design I used a stencil I made out of oak tag with 1/4" wide strips cut out of it (I used an exacto knife to make clean cuts).  Take the stencil and lay it across your cookie.

In the picture you can see I also tries doing 1/2" wide stripes, they ended up being too big for my cookie.  Next I sprayed a LIGHT coat of color mist over the stencil and cookie.  If you want a darker color spray a light coat, give it a few seconds to dry and then spray another light coat.  If you spray too much at once it gets a watery, splotchy look and loses the designs sharp lines.

 Give it a few seconds to dry, it really didn't take long.





Then go ahead and flip the stencil to be going the other direction and spray another light mist over the cookie.

And voila! A beautiful and elegant cookie in just a few minutes! 

I had a lot of fun making these cookies, and am looking forward to trying this style again.  Next time I would perhaps grab some stencils, or make my own.  I hope you'll give these a try and impress your friends and neighbors!

What I've been baking part 2

There is so much to do before moving, and so little time to do it. We leave in less than a month, and I just added ‘sell car’ to the to-do list. Yikes, that will certainly keep me busy. Today I plan on hitting the internet and figuring out how much to price my car at, but before I get going on that I thought I’d finish up the rest of my dino lesson!

My last post I talked about how the studnents went digging for dinosaur bones and then identified them. After they dug up the bones (that I made at home) they returned to their sand tubs and started digging for fossils (we learned about fossils the day before).



I think I see one! When the students began to see what looked like a fossil they switched over to their brush tool to uncover it the whole way, they didn’t want to accidentally break the fossil!



And there it is! When their fossil was completely uncovered they put it in their bucket with their bone and headed back to their seats. Once seated they drew a picture of their fossil in their dinosaur notebook, just like a real paleontologist would do. Then they had to make an educated quess as to what they had found a fossil of.



Want to know the best part of the whole fossil experience? They made the fossils themselves. They actually made them the day before after we finished talking about fossils.

I made the ‘dough’ the night before (recipie below) using coffee grounds that Starbucks kindly saved up for me. To save time I split the dough into pieces for each kid, made it into a round disk shape and then wrapped it in parchment paper and placed it in a ziplock baggie. Then I collected sticks, leaves, stones, shells, and made dinosaur foot print stamps out of potatoes. The next day the materials were all out on the table and the kids just had to pull out their parchment paper wrapped ‘dough’ open it up and start stamping/pressing. We found, due to the dark color of the fossil dough, that the bigger, thicker objects to make impressions with worked better, i.e. footprint stamps, sticks, rocks. The leaves and shells still made an impression, but they had to press really hard. When their fossil looked the way they wanted I wrote their name on the parchment paper their fossil was on so we knew who belonged to each one.

The only downside to this was that due to the coffee grounds and coffee in the fossil dough it smelled like coffee( bet you figured that out already). The kids didn’t love the smell, and one of the kids actually had to walk away and look at a dinosur book while we made his fossil for him. This would probably work better outside. If you think your students/kids might not like the coffee smell you could try using the dinosaur bone dough instead. I did like how dark these fossils came out though, and a little rough which made them seem more real. In fact, some of the kids thought they were!

Fossil Dough

1 cup of used coffee grounds
1/2 cup of cold coffee
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup of salt

Mix all the ingredients together and then form the dough into ½ inch thick circles. Stamp and decorate away. You can either let them sit out for 24 hours to dry, or pop them in the oven at 350* for 20 minutes.

Then you can share your fossil with everyone!

What I've been baking part 1

I haven't posted much lately because things have been a little crazy. I just finished my last term working on my masters in School Library Media, with the hope of being a school librarian. Oh yeah, and I'm moving to Houston in a month! Yikes!
Anyway, finishing up my last term of grad school meant three classes and a 'student teaching' experience in the local middle school's library. Obviously, this kept me pretty busy, but it hasn't kept me out of the kitchen entirely. Just look at what I cooked up for school:



Yes! That is what you're thinking (as long as your thinking it's a dinosaur bone)! I did a three day mini unit in the library with the life skills students on dinosaurs. It turned out pretty well, and the last day was the best. I created a dinosaur dig for the students to participate in. There were two parts and I'll share the first part today.

I created dinosaur bones the night before the dig. I made 9 bones in three different 'styles,' the recipie is at the end. The next day I buried them in tubs full of sand. After a discussion about what a Paleontologists is, and instructions on how to dig each student got their own tool kit (a bucket, shovel and paint brush), a fun nickname (at their request) my favorites were: fossil, sharkman, and, of course, the girl who picked Ms. Kelly as her nickname:), and a visor. Then we went to work!



The students used their shovels to dig until they found what they thought was a bone. Then they switched to their paintbrush so that they wouldn't damage the bones they found. The kids did a great job!



Once they completely uncovered their bones they took them to a table nearby where they had to use the picture to figure out which dinosaur their bone came from. Once they knew what dinosaur they found they drew a picture of the bone and the dino it was from in the dinosaur notebook which they had used each day to take notes in.



I had planned to keep the bones, but the students were so excited about their finds I ended up letting them take them home. The bones weren't hard to make, I used this simple recipie which you could use to make your own bones, or any clay figurine you want. I used the recipie here

Bread Dough Clay

2 C. Flour
1/2 C. Table Salt
3/4 C. Water

Mix the salt and flour together. Then make a well in the middle of the flour and slowly add the water. Mix it with a fork or your hands (I used my hands). Knead the mixture till it is not sticky but smooth. It should feel similiar to clay. If it is to dry add a little water at a time, and if it is too wet add a little flour. Theny go ahead and make your bones! Place them on a baking sheet and bake them at 300* for about an hour. Keep an eye on them, depending on their size will depend on how long it takes. They're done when they are hard and starting to brown on the bottom.

I hope you'll give this a try sometime, it would be great not only for a school lesson, but for a dinosaur birthday party too!

Ok, name that dinosaur:

Happy Easter

Happy Easter! Hope you are having a wonderful holiday full of family and friends!

A sweet April fools joke!

Looking for an April fools joke that is easy, fun, and won’t make people want to retaliate by putting snakes in your bed? This is it!

Picture it: Offer your favorite child, friend, boyfriend, relative, or complete stranger a nice can of fruit.



"Go ahead, pick any one!" Hand them their prefered eating utensil and watch as they pop the can open. Imagine their surprise when...



Hey! That's not fruit! it's...



Chocolate! Surprise! Who wouldn’t love to get chocolate when they were expecting fruit? The best part is that if they want to retaliate, they probably won’t put snakes in your bed or saran wrap over the toilet.

Here’s how you do it. Get a can of something with a pop-can top and a regular tin can bottom. I bought these fruit cocktail cans at Acme. Flip them over and using a can opened that releases the glue seal, NOT one that just cuts through the metal, take off the bottom.



Empty the fruit out then wash and dry out the inside of the can. Then fill the can with whatever you want. Just keep in mind that whatever you want them to see first you want to put into the can first, because the can is upside down.



Once you've filled it up with whatever you want to surprise people with hot glue the bottom back on. If you don't fill the can the whole way up you may want to stuff the empty parts of the can with tissue paper so your surprise doesn't rattle around, make a lot of noise, and give the game away.

Once the hot glue dries flip the can over and give it to your unsuspecting friend. It took me less than 15 minutes from start to finish. So if you're looking for an easy, cute, and fun April Fools joke, try this one!

I am so fortunate to have you!

Happy Day after Valentine's! I know most people are ready to move on to the next holiday and swap out their red for green, but I have one more idea to share. Put it in the idea pot for next year because it is CUTE. Don't take my word for it though, just look:



Isn't it adorable? I got the idea at Eighteen25, only they did it for teachers for the first day of school. I book marked it months ago and had been eagerly waiting for the time to come when I could make it my own.



This can be an incredibly simple gift, make a cute tag, throw the cookies in the box, bam you're done. I like to make things hard though. I made the cookies from scratch. I even tried two different recipies! I also made my own 'fortunes.' Only instead of fortune's I did reasons I was fortunate to have them in my life. I also dipped the finished cookies in chocolate and decorated them with sprinkles. Fun, but time consuming!

As I said, I used two different recipies. If you are going to do this yourself (it's not terribly hard, but does require a little practice), you need to decide what is important to you. The one recipie tasted like a regular fortune cookie, and looked nice when it was done. The second recipie was much better tasting than a regular fortune cookie, but didn't fold as nicely (the cookie would tear/crack). So you need to make a chocie there. Since I was giving them as gifts and was giving lots of them I didn't have time to fool around with the cookies so I used the first recipie. Still tasty, and since they never had the second recipie, they don't know what they're missing anyway!

The tastier recipie I found at Haniela's. I didn't have the cake and cookie emulsion, so I used 1/2 t vanilla and 1/2 t. almond instead

The easier to fold recipie I found at About.com

I found a great video on how to fold them here

I would HIGHLY recommend wearing thin cotton gloves (I bought mine at CVS). You fold the cookies while they are hot, and doing it with out the gloves was no fun, I had to go buy some gloves.

And for funsies, here is an adorable idea I saw someone had for halloween

I hope you had a lovely holiday, and that you put this idea away for a time when you need to tell someone how fortunate you are to have them in your life.

Happy Valentine's Day

Whether you are with someone or not, I hope you have a wonderful Valentine's Day. Take time to tell someone you love them, and maybe do something little for them. I think everyone just wants to be and feel loved. I think Valentine's day is a great reminder of that!