You may be asking, what the hell is a JFF cookie? Well, it’s a new term, and it means Just For Fun.

Ok, so it’s not REALLY a new term.

When you make iced sugar cookies for a living, sometimes they aren’t fun. They’re work. And when you’ve detailed your 631st football cookie, they’re just NOT fun anymore. Sure the first pan was KIND of fun.  Or not, because you’ve only outlined one sheet pan and there are 15 more to go. That can be daunting.

Then you think about what you COULD be doing for a job. Wearing a name tag, waiting on customers that are trying to return the shoes they wore into the store (no joke, that happened to me at Filene’s Basement) And then…those endless pans and racks of cookies start to look like a hell of a lot of fun.

For a few minutes.

But, then you know that once you finish the tedious task of 1500 football cookies you get to work on something like this:

I ADORE Hello Kitty!

You know what else I ADORE right now?

Small orders.

Just a dozen of each design.  Obviously, I didn’t do too much in design work on the Hello Kitty cookies, I mean, she’s PERFECT as is.

I DID design the birthday cake cookie though. I used our cake cutter from our Pink Birthday collection. Any Hello Kitty cake should have her bow and it must have some pink. Not much pink, just a touch.

We don’t get too many requests for Hello Kitty, which is weird, because she’s so perfect. I’ve had a thing for Hello Kitty since I was in the 6th grade, and if I was a tattoo kind of girl, Hello Kitty is most definitely what I’d have.

And if I could, I’d put a red bow on my real life Hello Kitty. I don’t think she’d like it though.

How lucky am I? We found Casper living on the mean streets of South Boston 8 years ago.

Serendipity.

Well, I gotta get back to packaging up all those footballs. I’ll be sure to take some pics so you can see the whole mess.

So, I feel like we’ve been working on football cookies for 40 days and 40 nights, but it’s only been 3 days and 3 nights.

We’re more than halfway through our big order and the finished cookies are wrapped up tight in our temperature/humidity controlled cookie room.

Before I could commit 100 percent to the big football project I had a few other things to finish up on Friday and Saturday.

One of those things was this Noah’s Ark cake. The cookie on top took FOREVER to make. (it especially seemed to take forever because I was working on it at 3am.

Dave baked the cakes, it’s a triple layer, yellow cake, with chocolate Swiss meringue BC filling and tinted vanilla bean Swiss meringue BC.

The client HAD to have this inscription on the cake. (not my favorite part) You know how I don’t like tons of irrelevant writing on cookies OR cakes…

I think I love the seal. The cookies were made to coordinate with the paper goods for the baby shower.

The cookie that took hours. You know how long it takes to mix all those colors, then you gotta get all the animals just right.

I sketched this out based on the images from the napkins and paper plates. I had to reposition a lot of the animals to make it into a cookie. I think next time, I’d ice the entire cookie and pipe the animals on top. I don’t really love how there is so much cookie showing. I added more animals the night before to fill in the blank space. (the birds and the ostrich)

I added big, blue, buttercream bubbles to finish the top.

And of course a grosgrain ribbon on the cake drum to finish it off.

The delivery was Saturday morning, it went smoothly despite the steepest and longest driveway ever.

Now it’s back to the coal mines. So far, in two days we’ve used 24 pounds of confectioners sugar!!! I think we’ll be shopping for more very soon!!

Well, not REALLY “just for fun”. I don’t make too many cookies “J F F” anymore.  I try to create collections that we sell on our site that are for fun. And the first time I make each one it IS fun, but after the 50th box, the fun has left the building.

I made these with icing and ideas left over from an actual job (that WAS fun since it was a fairly small number of cookies, 48)

We’re trying to show clients that there are more options than what people usually order: plain two color, outline and fill, state shaped cookie, with a heart or star marking the city they’re from, or live in, or wherever the wedding is (boring!!). Also, see this post for some fun, unique, new wedding favor ideas.

THIS was the real job. Only a dozen of each. They were based on the design of the invitation. I LOVE that.

And a dozen each is enough to get good at the design/technique and not enough to make you crazy.

Speaking of quantities that make you crazy….

We’ve begun the big 2660 Patriot’s cookie order. I’m on my 4th tray of outlined foam fingers. We’ll finish the fingers today, there are 3 more sheet pans. Each pan has about 55 cookies.

There will be one extra helper today, and she’ll be filling a lot of footballs and foam fingers!!

Then there are around 600 players and I don’t even know how many referees. Once they are all done, I’ve got to arrange them into around 45 platters and wrap them with cello. Who knows if they’ll all fit in the car.

Of course before I could start helping Dave with the Patriots cookies, I had to finish some smaller jobs. 24 snowmen, 4 dozen Thank You cookies, 4 dozen more of those cute Pink Birthday cookies, and a Noaah’s ark cookie cake. I’ll try to take pics of all that before they get  packaged.

In the meantime, have a great weekend and don’t try coming to our bakery this weekend… NO CUPCAKES, ONLY COOKIE PRODUCTION!! The Bake Shoppe will be closed and we’ll re-open next weekend.

Dave and I are getting ready to start a HUGE job today. One that’s the biggest in a long time.

Two thousand, six hundred, sixty cookies. PLUS, more to fill in the online orders. It’s going to be a long weekend. (I’ve also got a big, Noah’s Ark cake to deliver tomorrow morning!)

Its’ funny because we had a conversation last weekend before the Patriots won the game Sunday night. “If they win we could sell a lot of cookies. If they lose we should call Tom Brady and tell him he owes us whatever we lose in sales”  Well, we didn’t think the Patriots win would translate into the orders we’ve taken in so far. A lot of boxes and one order for 2660 cookies. To be delivered on Wednesday.

Thank you Tom Brady and the entire team. Casper the cat can now get her teeth cleaned, and the mortgage is paid for another month! Woohoo!

So before I get up and delve into cake and football cookies, here are some fun girly cookies from last week!!

I created this collection last year, but we needed our pictures to be more consistent on the website. I added the rings this time around, but I’m not so sure I’m all that good at rings.

I wish I knew how to make a real cake like that…

Once again, we needed consistently styled photos for the site, so this is a repeat but I did make the slice of cake larger.

I’m still pretty happy with this collection.

So, if you want football cookies for the game, PLACE YOUR ORDERS TODAY!!  FREE SHIPPING ends tonight and there’s only so many cookies we can make in three days!!

We’ve been thinking about these collections for a long long time, and FINALLY, we got to actually produce a few samples.

Since we live in VT and EVERYONE here has been entitled to marry since 2009, I thought it was high time we recognized it in cookie form!

I wanted to create a collection that could do triple duty, so the designs are fairly simple.

I had created a platter last Summer for a regular client that included similar Bride and Groom cookies, and I knew then that I wanted to make these collections.

Really, they can be for whatever you want them to be. Bridal showers, engagement parties, even bachelor parties. They can be for same sex weddings, or not.

Classic Tiffany colors, silver hearts and the same cake and car designs from our “I Do” Wedding collection.

I really couldn’t be happier with these collections.

And I really couldn’t be happier to live in such and awesome state!!

I <3 Vermont!!!

First, I know I should be posting football cookies today.

Second, We Go Together only makes me think of Grease and THIS SCENE

BUT, it’s really about perfect pairs.

Coffee and Doughnuts. What’s better than that?

Possibly Bacon and Eggs.

mmmm bacon.

Burgers and Fries are pretty amazing, especially if they’re from Five Guys!

Chocolate and peanut butter are pretty fantastic too…peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, peanut butter cups…

I just don’t think anything can top Cookies and Milk though.

You can purchase any of the above sets to send to your sweetie.

OR

You can order the whole set!

And present them on a platter for dessert!!

What’s your perfect pair?

Sometimes we get tired of making the same old cookies over and over and over.  Take our Boston cookies, we make SO many of them, it can get a little tedious. While we’re glad that they are popular, we’d really love to work on some different cookies.

We recently got a request for a cookie that was so complex, there was no way to produce it in an economical and fast way, while including all the detail the client wanted. We suggested an edible image of the design, with some piped, sugared and disco dusted details. The mock ups looked great, but we didn’t get the job. Which wasn’t the end of the world since they wanted such a large quantity in a REALLY short turnaround time (think 150 cookies from VT to NYC in 3 days)

I’m not a HUGE fan of the edible image cookies on their own, and Dave’s not a fan of the actual printer itself, but with the addition of the Royal Icing details, I’m really loving these designs.

You really can’t get all that imagery on a cookie with icing, and the choices are almost endless. We really liked the vintage postcard theme, but you could design your own and then choose the elements that you want to pull out with icing, sugar and sparkles.

For the first cookie, I chose to outline the letters with white icing and sprinkle white disco dust, then I outlined the outer border with gold icing and covered that with gold sanding sugar.

For the Blue card, I brought out some of the clouds, the border and the outline of the letters.

They still take a bit of time. Image cookies may seem simple and sometimes I think it’s the “easy way out”, but, when you think about the time it takes to format the images to maximize your edible paper (which is NOT cheap), then the time it takes to print the images, and the number of sheets you lose because the color on your printer is out of whack (this is VERY common and we lose at least 1-2 sheets per job). Add in the ink, which is very expensive, the labor in cutting the images, icing the cookie, then applying the image sheet…it’s almost as time consuming as a completely hand iced cookie.

Unless you know a faster, cheaper easier way that I’m unaware of.

Aside from all that, you can have a lot of fun with edible images. We found this postcard that was originally “Hunting in Poland”, we changed it to Vermont, which I think is SO fun!

I iced the copy in green and covered it with green disco dust, then brought out the antlers and nose with some dark brown royal icing.

The next time you’re looking for a fun favor for a destination event,  vintage postcards, or vintage posters just might be what you need!!

I saw that on a card once and I thought it would make a unique Valentine’s Day cookie collection.

I had to search high and low for some fun anchor ideas.

I used some really basic anchor shapes and some that I had never seen before. Then, with the addition of some cute, red hearts and some rope….they were exactly what I had envisioned!

The truth is that I LOVE anything nautical. Probably because I grew up on Cape Cod, with a Dad and Grandfather that both had sailboats. And now that I live in a landlocked state…I miss the ocean.

These will be available in our online store by the end of the day!!

Those are the bulk of events we’ve been making custom cookies for lately, and we even have a Noah’s Ark cake coming up in a couple of weeks! It should be super fun.

Anyway, these are some basic Onesie favors from a couple of weeks ago.

I don’t even remember how many we made.

This was a fun job, we created hang tags to coordinate with the cookies and the invitation. UPS nearly thwarted delivery on these, but they made it in time and the client was very understanding. (and she loved her cookies!)

These were actually produced during Christmas…LITERALLY, during Christmas.

I decided on a new technique for the giraffe’s spots. Still time consuming, but much better end results.

Teacups for a Sweet Sixteen Tea Party. The client just wanted pink tea cups, so we came up with this design.

Dave designed the custom toppers.

Along with two more Valentine’s Day collections, we’ve got more baby showers to work on this week. (and probably…MORE football cookies!!)

Dave and I have been eating kale no less than 4 times a week. Not because of the whole kale controversy, but, because we can always count on a bounty of it at the Farmer’s Market in the dead of Winter, AND, it’s super duper healthy.

One of our favorite, and easiest dinners is seared salmon with sauteed kale and roasted sweet potatoes.

The most difficult part is trimming and cleaning the kale. I do the trimming, Dave does the cleaning using our salad spinner, and then I chop it up.

Dave is also in charge of the sweet potatoes.

This meal requires only 7 ingredients and it’s so satisfying!

Salt
Lemon Pepper
Garlic
Olive Oil
1 bunch of Kale
2 6 oz salmon fillets
2 Sweet potatoes

There really are no specific amounts, but I’ll tell you what we use. You could use more or less salt/pepper and garlic.

The first step is to preheat your oven to 425 and line a baking sheet with foil (you don’t have to do the foil if you don’t want to)

Scrub the potatoes and cut them into 1 1/2 to 2 inch cubes. We leave the skin on, you should too, it contains lots of nutrients.

Throw the sweet potatoes in a big bowl, OR place them on the sheet pan. Drizzle the sweet potatoes with olive oil and toss to coat. We use about 1 to 2 tablespoons of olive oil, depending on how large the sweet potatoes are.

Spread the sweet potatoes on the sheet pan and sprinkle liberally with salt. (we only use Kosher, or Sea Salt) When the oven comes to temp, place the pan of sweet potatoes in the oven and roast for about 15 min, then check on them. If they have browned, flip them over and roast for another 10 minutes, check on them again and adjust your time if more is needed.

While the Sweet potatoes are roasting, trim the kale. You need to get the leaves off of the stems. The stems are too tough to eat. HERE is a video on how to separate the leaves from the stems. I use the fold over method, it’s much quicker and so much easier than the first method!

Clean the leaves as you would clean lettuce.

Smash and chop 1 or two garlic cloves. Set aside.

Heat 2 teaspoons of olive oil in a saute pan over med-high heat.

Generously sprinkle the flesh side of your salmon fillets with salt and lemon pepper.

Once the pan is hot, place the salmon, flesh side DOWN in the pan. Cover and turn the heat to medium. This will sear the fish and make a nice salty crust, the cover will make sure the salmon is cooked all the way through.

While the salmon is cooking, heat a tablespoon of olive oil in another saute pan, add the garlic and cook until softened. You don’t want to brown it. Add the kale, sprinkle with salt, and using tongs keep tossing the kale until it’s coated with the oil and the garlic is distributed throughout. The kale will start to wilt

At this point you can uncover the salmon and turn it over (carefully). Let the salmon cook uncovered until it’s cooked all the way through. Sometimes I use a thermometer, sometimes I just poke the thickest part of the fillet with a knife to see if the juices run clear.

Plate it all up and enjoy!!