Yet another cookie collection to add to our catalog of cookies!! And to think I’ve been doing this cookie thing for almost 8 years and I’ve never made an Equestrian collection!!

These were requested by a friend who is a Dressage expert.  I honestly didn’t know WHAT to do for this collection, so I dug into one of my passions…the clothes!!

Dressage riders get to wear super nifty jackets, hats and boots. Plus, they get the coolest saddles! I didn’t have a ton of time to come up with this so I found some images of the Dressage fashion and just used those as the basis for my cookies. I also basically modified a clipart image of the horse and rider, which I’m pretty happy with.

We even included some sugar cube cookies for the horse!! (I don’t think the horse actually ate the cookies, but it was the best I could do since we didn’t have actual sugar cubes in the bakery)

As soon as Valentine’s Day production was done, we had to start work on this super fun, pretty, girly Dessert table.

I’m talking MINUTES after the cookies were out the door, cakes had to be baked, maple popcorn had to be made, new soft pink and light perriwinkle cookies had to be cut and baked. It was crazy. We were working on 4 hours of sleep in 3 days.

BUT, the table was fun, and the best part…we got to actually attend the event.

I just love donating this dessert table to The Little School, they give me complete freedom to create a theme and sweets for this annual event.

Here’s what I came up with:

A romantic, pink and silver, vintage French table. I have a thing for Paris, and all things French.

I really wanted the colors to be very soft and muted.

We served strawberry marshmallows, cookie pops cookies, maple popcorn, strawberry rice krispie treats dipped in white chocolate, and mini cupcakes.

We made three small cakes that were part of the table decor, but also were used for the raffle.

Three people got to take home a cake! This was my very first attempt at a ruffle cake. Which isn’t so bad for a first try, but next time I’ll do better at getting the ruffles straight. This is a 4 inch, 4 layer chocolate and yellow cake with chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream filling and pink tinted, vanilla bean Swiss meringue buttercream.

***I know this post will be replaced tomorrow, but I got some feedback regarding this cake and the fact that I didn’t list my “Inspiration” for it. Well, as you may or may not know it has been done a million times and since I always like to give credit where credit is due, here is where I got my inspiration for this cake.***

If anyone knows who INVENTED it, or was the very first person to ever make it, I’d appreciate it.

This was a 6 inch, triple layer, chocolate cake with vanilla bean Swiss meringue butttercream.  I had seen this technique on I am Baker’s blog a while ago and thought it was pretty.

The third cake was a 6 inch, yellow cake with vanilla bean buttercream and an Eiffel Tower cookie. I made the little white chocolate hearts with the white chocolate left over from the rice krispie treats. I had planned to add lots more cookies to the sides of this cake, but as usual, I ran out of time!

We tied silver satin ribbons on the krispy treat sticks, and used printables from Party Ever After on Etsy.

I had hoped to use more of the paper goods, but we were running around at the last minute. I made the cones in the kit and used them for maple popcorn (which is THE most addictive food EVER!)

We got several yards of pale pink tulle that added to the romantic vibe. Mini cupcakes were served in paper wrappers we made out of fun paper that we had on hand. I had tons of French-y stuff around the house to use, like my favorite collection of Eiffel towers that I actually bought in the gift shop at the base of the Eiffel tower.

It was a super fun night at The Village Green Gallery in Weston, with bubbly from Meditrina in Chester, and super sweets from A Dozen Eggs.

I only wish we weren’t so exhausted!

The best part of the evening was our little “after party”.  A late night dinner at The Downtown Grocery. Pork belly, roasted oysters, my favorite arugula salad and Dave’s favorite burger…all rounded out with a bottle of Mas de la Dame.

I’m already thinking about next year’s dessert table. Any ideas??

YOU!! IF you order some cookies!

Or not. Anyway, here’s another collection that is completely new to me. I mean, sure I’ve seen other peoples version, and I always thought I’d leave the Academy Award cookies to everyone else, but this year Dave wanted us to get in on the Oscar’s action.

And then I had all these ideas for some different cookies. And then the day’s passed and there just wasn’t enough time, so watch out next year. There will be FOUR Academy Awards cookie collections!

For now, we’ve got two, one is a nice mix of Oscars, gowns, tuxedos, envelopes, cameras, kleig lights and clapboards.

The other one is shimmering gold stars and Oscar himself.

You want another look?

I’ve even included a red carpet with velvet ropes.

Just for fun, I made these:

Do you know who’s gown I based my cookie on??

If you can guess, I’ll send you the set!

Only the dress and tuxedo, but hey, it’s free cookies…

Let’s hear what you think!!

Let the good times roll!!

Oh my, it’s been so so long!! I apologize, but it’s been kinda busy and there are SO many topics that I’d love to blog about, it’s just hard to know where to begin.

We can start with this new collection that I finished a few days ago. Cutting it a little close, but there’s still a tiny bit of time!!

This is a completely new collection for me, Mardi Gras!!

I’ll have more posts to come this week.

Thanks for hanging in there!!

We’ve got lots more super NEW cookies coming soon. Plus, we’re working on some really fun St. Patrick’s Day, Spring and Easter collections. I hope you’ll visit again!!

As in the keys on a piano. Duh.

If you follow us on facebook,then you’ve already seen this cake, so I’m sorry, but I had planned on posting the story of our big 2660 cookie job from last week, and…well, we don’t really want to talk about that just now.

I suppose we don’t have to worry about any more football cookies and we can just focus on all those Valentine’s Day cookies that need to be made in the next 3 days.

BTW, have you ordered your Valentine’s Day cookies?? If not, you better do it soon, it’s getting VERY close!!

We made this cake for our friends who were hosting a dinner for a visiting classical pianist, Charlie Albright.

They didn’t ask for this kind of cake, just a dessert, but I’ve been wanting to make a music cake for a while and this was a perfect opportunity.

I’m pretty happy with the end result, I had wanted to incorporate the logo of the theater, The Paramount in Rutland, but it just didn’t fit anywhere on the cake.

It’s a triple layer, 8 inch, yellow cake with chocolate buttercream filling and vanilla bean buttercream.

And of course vanilla sugar cookies!!

Since I’m not very good at decorating cakes, I use the medium that I know…cookies!

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!!!