Year of the Snake!

Chinese New Year is just two weeks away.

I’m always trying to think of new ideas for cookie collections.  Since we created a collection for Mardi Gras last year,  and missed Chinese New Year, I thought now was the time!

Chinese New Year is February 10th!

This year is the Year of the Snake, so we have this cookie as the centerpiece of the collection.

The collection is made using only 3 colors, red, gold and a little bit of white. In order to keep it in our standard price range for collections, there isn’t a ton of hand painted gold on the cookies. The “Year of the Snake” cookie is iced in gold and then airbrushed with gold sheen. I thought about adding fun embellishments on the corners, but with the need to make them more efficient production-wise, I decided to skip that.

Sometimes too much detail can spoil a simple design.

Red Envelopes, or Red Packets.

One of the traditions for Chinese New Year is the gifting of Red Envelopes, or Red Packets containing money. We had to have Red Envelope cookies!

The amount of money in the Red Envelopes should be of even numbers. The number 8 is considered lucky and is commonly found in the envelopes.

I wonder if that’s the origin of that catalog, Red Envelope?
I also wonder if it’s somehow related to the market, Super 88?

These were suppose to be the “Simple” cookie in the collection, but I wanted to put the Chinese character for Snake on them. Along with a border on the top and bottom.

Can you see the mistake in the photo??

The Lantern Festival is on the last day of Chinese New Year.

The Lantern festival is on the 15th, or last day of the Chinese New Year celebration, so we had to have lanterns!

This is my favorite design for this collection. I love the shape and the fringe at the bottom.

My first and final designs.

I really wanted to incorporate some painted gold, but in the end I really liked the cleaner look of the all red lantern with the gold icing.

The collection for sale now at adozeneggs.com

There is some painted gold on the firecrackers, just two small stripes. So I got some in there!

This collection is available now on our site: A Dozen Eggs Just click and place your order!!

We’ve got a few more new collections coming soon. It seems like 1st quarter has lots of occasions for cookies: Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year, Awards Season, Valentine’s Day, Superbowl, and Groundhog Day!

What, you don’t celebrate all those??

It’s another disappointing year for Patriots fans, especially Dave. We had such plans for Superbowl snacks!

He’s assured me that he’ll still be watching the Superbowl, so I can stick with the menu plans…just a bummer for cookie sales. I suppose we can still make 49′ers and Ravens cookies, but it’s not the same when it’s not “your team”…

Anyway, we are gearing up for a WICKED cold spell here. It could get as low as -35!!! We’ve been having problems with our pellet stove for 3 weeks. That’s 3 weeks of Dave pulling it out of the fireplace, cleaning it, replacing various parts, and lots of frustration and swearing. Don’t worry though, we have oil as a backup, just not enough to get through the entire Winter. Also, the fact that we have two tons of pellets in the basement does not help. Seems like a waste when the stove isn’t working right.

Today we took a trip to Granville, NY to pick up yet another part for the stove…so far it seems to be working. But keeping it going all night long and all day will be the real test.

Keeping warm!!

Daisy and Casper can tolerate one another well enough to share the dog bed.

We’ve been working on cookies as usual. Here is the latest job.

These were the most difficult!

This was the third order from this client.

The first two orders were to replicate the INOA tube. We wrapped them in cello bags and finished the packaging with neon green, grosgrain ribbon.

I thought these were difficult!

Then she placed an order for three more designs.

All four so far.

This design required the airbrush, plus some hand painting of the design on the side.

I initially tried it with icing, but it was super sloppy. The spaces were just way too tiny for RI.

So I went with the paintbrush.

This design wasn’t as difficult as the others to figure out, but that tiny white writing with a super tiny tip is just as hard.

Most of the time figuring out which techniques to use to translate a design is the hardest part for these kinds of cookies. And that was true for this job. Also, there are many more details on the actual product packaging, but it would be impossible to get it all on a cookie with icing, so knowing which details to use and which ones to leave out is also a challenge.

I can’t wait to see what other packaging this client sends my way!!

This afternoon we’ll be working on some Baby Snoopy cookies, polka ducks and “preppy” birthday cookies…I like the idea of all of them. Plus, the designs will be much simpler to execute than product packaging!!

If you’re someplace cold, stay warm and don’t leave your pets outside!! They should all be as cozy as my Daisy and Casper!
PS don’t worry, Franklin and Lily are cozy too!!

With the Patriots’ game this weekend, we had to make some updates to last year’s cookie collection.

As Laura referenced yesterday, this was a great seller, but I still felt like it needed some improvement.

First off, I redesigned the players so that they were a bit larger and with more angles, removing the oval background.

I was happy with the design of the Brady and Wilfork cookies, so I left that alone and just separated them from the background.

I wasn’t really happy with Patriots’ Tight End Rob Gronkoswki’s cookie from last year, so I worked on was a replication of  his famous touchdown spikes:

But then he reinjured his forearm and would be out for the rest of the playoffs. Bad for me and worse for the Patriots.

Hmmm. What to do? I needed another cookie….
Then it hit me, Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick’s Hoodie (I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before)!
This was the first go at it. Sloppy writing and too much writing.

Laura suggested simplifying the front and came up with the COACH and pocket idea.

In the end, I decided to just go with the pocket. Keep it simple is a good rule to live by.

So, here’s the entire collection:

I like the way the collection turned out. I’m feeling pretty good about the game this weekend (as a long-time Boston sports fan, you are never 100% confident in any outcome), but I’m looking forward to a good game with lots of beer and pretzels.

Hopefully they’ll win because the Super Bowl is in New Orleans this year and I’ll take any excuse to get Laura to make Jambalaya!

And if they don’t make it, it is what it is.

Go Pats!

So I missed New Year’s and I missed the end of Christmas here on the blog, but it’s a new year and Dave and I are coming up with new collections, and new designs for old collections.

One of the categories on our site that was super old and getting a little stale was our Baby collections. We really like doing things different than most other cookie companies and our Baby cookies were just “ho hum” “been there done that”.

Baby was a super hard theme for us to narrow down into a basic collection because, much like Christmas and Halloween, there are just SO many different things you could make into cookies. When it comes to creating a collection of cookies you have to take a few things into account, originality, production, colors, ratio of simple to complex designs, the sizes and shapes of the cookies and cohesion of the designs.

I searched everywhere, looked through new baby invitations, wrapping paper, clip art, books, you name it, I’ve studied it.  In all those searches, I came across a seller on Etsy, Sabina’s Ink Nest, who does hand drawn designs into clip art (as opposed to digitally created images and designs). I contacted Sabina, purchased the clip art and went to work converting the images into cookies. Hope you like them!!

Here’s our new Basic Baby collection:

New Baby Girl

A different view so you can see all the cookies.

All the pinks are custom blends that I created using a super fun website called Design Seeds. I used the palette called “Doughnut Dreams” for the girl collection and “Holiday Sparkle” for the boy collection.

And Baby Boy:

I kept some of the colors the same within the two collections, like the gold for the bears and that very same gold for the rocker on the elephant and the base of the baby bed.

Just for a more masculine look, I added a bow tie on the onesie instead of the flower from the girls onesie.

Now, if you don’t know the sex of the new baby, you can also get “baby surprise”:

We also added a cowboy Baby collection to the site, you can see it if you click the link HERE. Cowboy was created from an order that we had for a cowboy baby platter.

As I type, Dave is working on a new football collection for the New England Patriots. (we make these every year) Being originally from Boston, this is a necessary collection for us.

You can see the old collection and one of our largest orders HERE.  I hope the Pats win the next game!!

The Baby cookies are on our site and ready to order now.

Stay tuned for a new Patriots collection, tweaks had to be made since Gronkowsi broke his arm….