We have been meaning to try making a ballerina set cookies for a while, and we know a few little girls who would be the perfect recipient for these cookies. So when we saw this ballerina template from Cake Journal we just knew we had to make them :)

So here is what the ballerina tutus & ballet slippers platter looks like.

And lets explore how to make these cookies :)

Firstly, i want to show you the gorgeous template that we found from Cake Journal (see below)

I found that the ballet slippers a tad too big for my liking, specially when compared to the tutus so i printed 2 templates, one that i cut out for the tutus and another smaller template for the slippers. This is just my personal preference, you can keep it the same size as the template if you prefer.

After we have the template ready, we get busy baking and having fun decorating :)

We used the chocolate cookies recipe for the dough and here they are fresh out of the oven

Its the same steps for pink tutus, outline the cookies with piping consistency icing then fill them in with pink flooding icing. Let the cookie dry for a few hours (best overnight) before moving on with the next step.

So lets decorate them :) These cookies are simple to decorate because its only using 2 colours icing, pink & white...my kind of cookies, easy & simple :)

Lets start with the bellet slippers, as usual first thing to do is to outline the cookies with piping consistency icing then fill in with pink flooding icing. Let the cookie dry for a few hours (best overnight) before moving on with the next step.

Pipe a small bow with white piping icing on the ballet shoe and let it dry. Then finish the ballerina slippers by adding satin ribbon.

Its the same steps for the pink dress/gown, outline the cookies with piping consistency icing then fill them in with pink flooding icing. Let the cookie dry for a few hours (best overnight) before moving on with the next step.

Hope the girls love these tutus & ballerina slippers as much as we love making them :)

We've just been told by Claudia's school that we have another chance to do a netball fundraising this weekend. We had such a great response to the whale cookies for the first netball fundraising that we decided we will do another batch of cookies for this event too....hey its for a good cause right? ;-)

So we did a little brainstorming session...and because it is now winter time and its been so cold lately that its appropriate to do a snowman cookies with earmuffs. This was totally inspired by the famous Sweet Sugar Belle, she is an amazing cookie decorator and I really love her awesome work.

This is probably our biggest task in baking and decorating since we started this new adventure. We donated two dozen of whale cookies last time, and this time we want to do a little bit more.

We baked and decorated 48 snowman and 72 snowflakes to go with the snowman cookies, a total of 120 cookies baked, decorated, sealed and delivered....so to speak! Wow that is a lot of cookies, for us this is big task as we never made this much cookies before.

This is what the platter of the snowmen and complimenting snowflakes looks like...

This first batch of cookies ready to go into the oven, and we made sure that they are completely cool before decorating starts.

With white piping consistency icing, outline the middle area, excluding the earmuffs. Then fill with white flood icing. Let the icing dry for a few hours.

After the white icing is dry, its time to add the earmuffs. Use a piping consistency icing to outline both the earmuffs, you can use any colours you like for the earmuffs, we decided red and lime green works well for what we had in mind. Fill the earmuffs with flooding icing and then sprinkle with sanding sugar. Then let it dry for a few hours.

The next step is to do the details:

• Use piping consistency icing to draw the line to connect the earmuffs.
  
• Use black piping icing to make the eyes - we used #2 piping tips.
  
• Use a stiff orange icing to create the carrot nose.
  
• Use a pink flooding icing to make the blushed cheeks.
  
• And lastly pipe the mouth with the same black icing that we use for the eyes.

Oh btw, check out our little 'sanding sugar station', my daughter Claudia set this up so that we can get a little production going and makes things easier for us....isn't she clever? :)

We also decided to make little snowflakes to accompany the snowman, i love the colours on all these little snowflakes :)

We also made a cookie gift tag to finish off the packaging. For the last netball fundraising we created "Have a Whaley good game" cookie tags for the whale cookies, this time we made "Hope you're having SNOW much fun!" cookie tags for the snowman cookies! :) I guess there are advantages when we know how to use photoshop, we can create these kind of things to suit the occasion when needed :P

 Here is the result, 3 dozen packs of snowman ready to go for the netball fundraising this weekend :)

Lets hope they will sell as well as the last batch of cookies at the netball fundraiser :)

A friend of mine shared an article in Facebook about a Hello Kitty Diner opening up in Australia, and when i saw the picture of Hello Kitty i remembered that we got given a Hello Kitty cookie cutter a whole back....i figured its time to dig it out and make Hello Kitty cookies :)

This time we also want to try making a chocolate cookies instead of our usual plain sugar cookies.
We found a great recipe from LilaLoa that we decided to try out.

Here is the result of our Hello Kitty baking session...so cute right??!! I just love Hello Kitty! ;)

So here is the baking and decorating process...if you read LilaLoa's chocolate cookies recipe its pretty easy to follow and she also provided the step by step instructions in her website.

A good friend of mine gave these cute Hello Kitty cookie cutter last year, it was a gift she brought back from her trip to the US. Glad that we can now made a full use of it :)

So we made the dough and we use the cookie cutter to cut into shape. These are what the cookies look like, after they came out of the oven and have been chilled.

Outlined the rest of the bow with black piping icing and let it dry.

Unfortunately we only have enough dough to make one full body Hello Kitty....next time we must rationed the dough properly so we get the same amount of each shape :)

This is what the full body Hello Kitty looks like....

We left it to cool down for a few hours before starting the decorating process.

Firstly, we outlined the area where we want to put the bow with a food marker. Note to self: next time use a different colour food marker so that it wont show up so much.

Using a red piping icing, we piped the middle part of the bow first and leave it for 30 mins ot so until its a bit dry before putting the rest of the bow to give it some dimension. We let the red bow to dry for a few hours. If you have colour bleed problem then i would leave it for longer (overnight if necessary).

Then use the white piping consistency icing to outline the face.

The next step is to use white flooding icing to fill the rest of the face, then let it dry for a few hours.
When the white icing is completely dry, start outlining the middle of the bow with black piping icing.

Then start adding the face features by piping a black icing to make the eyes and the whiskers and lastly finish it off by piping a yellow icing for the nose.

Here is a close-up of all the Hello Kitty heads when they were all done :)

Next is the full body Hello Kitty, i forgot to take a photo of the actual step by step decorating process but its pretty much the same with the steps we did for the face above.

With edible marker we mark the areas for the bow, the body, arms and legs. The just like the steps above we made the bow first and then fill the face and then some parts of the body (arms, neck and legs) with white icing. Here is what it looks like half way thru decorating...

Oh i forgot to mention that we always like having some accent cookies to accompany our main cookies, so in this case we made square chevron cookies to put in the gift bag, you can also see them in the finished result of the Hello Kitty platter at the beginning of this post.

Then outline the bow with black icing, add the face details and fill in the clothes with pink icing (or whatever colour you want her clothes to be). When the icing dries, outline the rest of her body with black icing and add the little details, such as the red stripes on her arms and the little white buttons on her clothes. And that was it....all done :)

Sealed the gift box with bows and little homemade tags and they are good to go! Taadaa....!! :)

Hope you are having an enjoyable day :)

It was my niece's birthday last week, and just like any little girl we know she loves the movie Frozen and Princess Elsa. So we decided to make her a special birthday package filled with Frozen cookies.

Well unfortunately, I don't own a princess dress cookie cutter, but we wont let that stop us...so I decided we can make a dress template and cut out the cookie dough free-hand. I do however own the snowflakes cookie cutter which makes life a bit easier.

I saw a Princess Elsa dress cookies from one of my Pinterest cookie inspiration and I knew as soon as i saw it that i want to make one just like that.

I will go through some of the steps that i did to make it, however just to show you what we had in mind, here is what the end result looks like...

I also have another lovely friend who happened to have a little girl that is a huge Frozen fan (i think almost every little girls are to be honest!), and because i know that if i make one batch of cookies, i will have quite a bit of cookie dough to work with we decided to make a another set of Frozen cookies for her too. Both of these girls lives overseas so we are sending these cookies away on a long trip :)

So now lets talk about the baking and decorating process....

We started with our favorite sugar cookies recipe from Sweet Sugar Belle and when we finished making the cookie dough we cut them out to to size using the template that i made for the dress and using snowflake cookie cutter.

While we are waiting for the cookies to cool off, we prepared the royal icing to decorate the cookies.
Because meringue powder is soo expensive in this country (NZ), we made our royal icing using egg whites, cream of tartar and icing sugar.

When the icing is ready, we separate them into bowls to be mixed with gel food colouring to create the colours we need to decorate the cookies. In this project we only need 2 colours, blue and white.

Then the fun part begins! With Princess Elsa's dress we started with outlining the middle bodice of her dress with blue icing. We used tip#2 and piping consistency for outlining, then fill it up with flood icing. Let it dry for 4-6 hours. Because we did it at night we just leave the icing to dry overnight.

After the blue icing is completely dry, add a few little lines at bottom of the dress to give it some dimension, just to make it looks like a dress has a little bit of a ruffle at the bottom.

Next step is to outline the white cape with tip#2 again and then fill it up with white flooding icing. While the white icing is still a bit wet, we sprinkle it with white sanding sugar to give the look of snow and add a bit of spakle to the dress.

Here is the step by step visual to give you an idea of the work in progress.

Then give it a few hours to dry completely. When its all dry and ready to be packaged up we put it inside a clear plastic cellophane, sealed it and put some ribbon to dress it up. I just love pretty packaging :)

Then we move on to the snowflakes. Here are the first batch of snowflakes after they have cooled-off

To decorate the snowflakes, we used tip#2 again (this is probably out favorite tip for outlining) and use a piping consistency icing to outline the snowflake, then fill it up with flood icing. Let it dry for 4-6 hours.

Here is the step by step visual to give you an idea of the work in progress.

When all the snowflakes base colour icing are dried, then you can get creative and try out all sort of different snowflake designs to give them a pretty and unique look. You can also mix and match the icing colours. They are really fun to make and they look amazing in a platter. This is what our snowflakes look like in a platter...

Now these cookies are going to travel a fair bit so i had to make sure that they are well packaged with lots of safety bubblewrap. And a lot of prayers, so that they will arrive safely without any breakages.

However this time i remember to take a photo of the packaging before i wrapped them for shipping.
If i didn't have to ship it overseas i would love to have given the package to them just like this...

Unfortunately seeing that they will have to travel a long way, we had to choose safety over pretty packaging :)

We wanted to make special cookies for our friend in Australia, so after looking around for some inspiration, (once again Pinterest is the source of inspiration) we decided to try making these cute little robot girl with pink tutus :)

We started with the body and then wait for at least 1 hour until the icing set a lttle bit before outlining and filling in the head, the feet, arms and ears. That way we will get a separation between those areas.

Wait for at least 6 hours or overnight before finishing off the rest of the details. We need to make sure that all the base colour icing are dry to ensure there wont be any bleeding with the colours.

After the icing is completely set, we added the little antena and little hearts on top of the antena.

Then we added the little pink bow on the top left corner. We then attached the 4 little hearts in her chest area with some royal icing.

The last step was to add her eyes, nose, her cute little pink tutus, and last but not least the little heart in her shoes.

This is the first time we are sending our cookies away to another country, heck its our first time ever sending our cookies anywhere coz usually we just give it away to the people around us....specially friends, family and work colleages.

Thankfully they arrived in Australia without any damages. I would be heart broken if they arrive in pieces or in a crumbly mess. Of course a lot of prayers went into it as well, and that's probably why they arrived safe and sound to their destination ;-)

My daughter's netball team is having a fundraising day and her school has asked for baking goods donation. So we decided to make some cookies for the fundraising. We've looked around Pinterest for some inspiration and honestly i can spend hours in that site just admiring so many talented people and their crafts.

We found a lot of really cool decorated sugar cookies, but a blog post in Bakerella really inspired us to give it a go :)

It was sugar cookies in a shape of a whale, which was made using a Santa cookie cutter. It looks easy enough to make because basically we only need to make one base colour and 2 other colours to compliment the whale.

To decorate the cookies, pipe the outline of the whale with a piping consistency icing, then fill in the cookies using flood icing and then let it dry for a few hours.

After the base colour is dry, start piping in the little details such as the gills at the bottom of the whale and outline the bottom fin using the piping consistency icing. Then add in the sprout

And of course we need to compliment these cute whales with pink little hearts to match their cute smiles

Just like the whale, we decorate the hearts by piping the outline and then filling them in using flood icing, then let it dry for a few hours.

And because we want to keep them fresh to sell during the fundraising, we wrapped them individually along with a cute little tags.

There you go...two dozen whales ready to go for Netball fundraising day :)

I really wished my mum live nearby, but unfortunately she lives halfway across the world from us, however my mother in law lives nearby and we wanted to do something extra special this year to let her know how much we appreciate all she does for our family.

So my daughter and I decided to make her a cookie bouquet. This is going to be the very first cookie bouquet that we ever made, well there is a first time for everything right? :)

Alrighty....so we got prepared with everything we need to make the perfect cookie bouquet:

• Skewers - to make the cookie pops
• Container - to put the cookies into

• Styrofoam - to put inside the container and hold the cookie pops in place
• Tissue paper - to cover up the base of the container and for packaging

This is what our cookie bouquet looks like...we love it as it turned out how we envisioned it to be :)

So here is what we did...firstly, we made the cookie pops with skewers, make sure to check the back of the cookie before putting them into the oven and patch up the areas where the skewers were inserted (i wished i had taken photos of this, but unfortunately we forgot to do that)

Then the fun part begins....we get to decorate the cookies!

We also took out some fondant and using some flower plunger cutter we cut out different types of flower decorations to add into the cookies for a more 3D look :)

here are some of the cookies after we finished decorating them with a combination of icing and fondant

Hope that gives you some encouragement to try making a cookie bouquet :)

Apparently its not just me and my daughter who get inspired to make cookies, my little boy had this awesome idea that he blurted out one night as we were reading a bedtime story.

We were reading one of his favorite book called "Dinosaurs Love Underpants", when suddenly he said "Mummy, i have a great idea! Why dont we make underpants cookies?!"

Just to give you an idea and a visual of where his inspiration comes from, here is his storybook that we were reading...

As you can see the colourful underpants gave him the inspiration :) I thought it was such a clever idea so my daughter and I proceeded with making underpants cookies to humour the little guy.

I have to say that my brilliant daughter let her creativity flows with the designs and she was totally awesome! Here is the result...

Can you see that plain green underpant with red trim at the bottom row? Yeah that was the only cookie i get to decorate....and as plain as it could get! LOL the rest of the underpants are my daughter's own designs....isn't she clever and artistic? :)

Here is the picture of both of of my kids proudly displaying their inspiration and final result of the cookies

Hope you enjoyed looking at those cute designs as much as we love creating them ;-)

As you can see, there are a lot of mistakes and imprefections...we still have a lot to learn :)
And here is a picture of my daughter, my gorgeous little assistant with our little teacups & cute fans.

As you may suspect, as a newbie in the cookie decorating world, we have recently acquire a lot of new cookie cutters. And we have some left over dough that we kept in the freezer from our last baking session, so we decided to try out a couple of new cutters...teacups and dainty little fan.

We forgot to take photos of the decorating progress, but we did take the photos of the finished result.

Once again we forgot to take photos of our baking and decorating progress! *duh!* I will have to make a self reminder to take the baking progress pictures in the future.

And just like Princess Anna said "do you wanna build a snowman?" (PS: if you have a little girl you will no doubt know this saying....lol)

Here are the close-ups of the snowman...they are so fun and easy to make!

Its now quite winter yet but it is approaching so we are practising by making snowmans and penguins.
Totally Inspired by Marian and her amazing blog Sweetopia, im following her tutorial to the letter...and someday i hope to channel her creativity and make my own creations...

But for now, here are the result of her inspiration :)

Next time we might try a peanut butter cookie recipe to go with these penguins & snowmans :)