SURPRISE! Happy Birthday Reader R! (part II)

So, as you now know, this past week was Reader R's birthday....

Her BIG party, however, was almost didn't happen...  in her mind, anyway!

I had set the scene several weeks ago by telling her that "Since Daddy was celebrating a BIG birthday this year, we just won't be able to have friends party for you, too."  She accepted the information graciously, but then she, unfortunately, spent several weeks being too self-less and over concerned about our finances.  (Opps!)

Anyway, the big day came, and all of her sweet little friends gathered at our house and anxiously awaited her arrival.  

I had decorated with LOTS of balloons, streamers, plastic table cloths, and pieces of fabric leftover from a baby shower several years ago.  Since I was trying to keep within a budget, I was thrilled to figure out that I could make these super fun tissue poofs, using the stash of leftover pink and purple tissue I have meticulously smoothed out and saved for the last 8 years!  I started with this great tutorial that I found on Pinterest.  (My only additions would be that you can use 1/2 a sheet for smaller balls, and for bigger balls, I liked 15-16 sheets better than 10, which looked a little sparse to me.)


The girls made fruit loop necklaces and played a couple of ice-breaker games while they waited for sweet R.  



When she got here, Reader R. was super surprised, and the girls rushed her with a big group hug!





Next, we had a super-girly breakfast with pink and purple pancakes, cherry yogurt, and sausage.  At the suggestion of this great blog post from Cassie at Hi Sugarplum,  I put fun toppings (strawberries, blueberries, bananas, granola, chocolate chips, and whipped cream) on the table for the pancakes and yogurt. (Actually, I got a LOT of "my" ideas from Cassie!!! Thank you!)  The girls also had fun cutting their pancakes into fun shapes with cookie cutters!


After breakfast, I painted the girls toenails.  (I had asked permission from the parents ahead of time, which was a good thing, because one little girl said "My mom doesn't let me paint my toenails without adult supervision."  I guess, I didn't count as an adult. ;^))  I kept the colors simple, pink, purple or blue, and then a second coat of "princess sparkles."  It was so fun.  the girls sat in a semi-circle around half of a dollar store plastic table cloth.  It was a great way to keep the nail polish put.  When we were done, I just wadded up the table cloth and tossed it!

Even her little sisters got in on all of the fun!

I kept the girls hands busy with a fun craft while I was painting their toes!  We made these cute flip-flops! I used this tutorial to do all the prep work ahead of time.  I also made a pair for myself and the two little sisters ahead of time, since I knew we would need a prototype and they wouldn't be able to get theirs done without my help and I would be painting toenails!


We opened gifts and then sang Happy Birthday!

Then, we enjoyed the cute cupcakes at the top of the post.  My good cookie friend, Kim from the Cookie Puzzle, lent me her fingernail polish cookie cutter and her recipe for glaze icing, which made these  nail polish bottles shinny and extra fun!  Thanks Kim!!

(Please ignore the construction zone in the background...
my wonderful husband is painting my dining room!)

The party favor bags included a bottle of water (wrapped in hot pink duct tape, like this idea, and then labeled with a fancy initial sticker; sorry, I forgot to take a picture), a package of pink bubble gum, and a set of party favor cookies with a pair of pjs (just like my daughter's favorites) and a bottle of nail polish.  (I'll post more about the PJ cookies soon.)

I also threw in a kit to make a cute bracelet that I had picked up in a 10 pack at Hobby Lobby, that was my back up craft, but that we ran out of time to do at the party!

A special thanks to Poppie for taking Reader R on a special date night and sleep over, so we could decorate  and really surprise her!  Thanks to Aunt Dana for being my right-hand girl, helping out in every way on party day!  Thanks to my Sweetheart for working so hard to help get the house ready and for capturing the big event for me!  Thank you to Kim and my SweetBook Sisters for all of your encouragement!  Thank you to Hi Sugarplum, Oh Sugar Events, Design Dazzle, and a thousand other hard-working moms on Pinterest for inspiration!

All pandemonium broke loose at pick up time when we momentarily lost control of the party! ;^)

Cheers!!
Sarah

P.S. - Come back tomorrow for all the details on the PJ cookies!

Congratulations Graduates!

This spring, I had the privilege to bake cookies for a couple of different graduation celebrations...

The first was a gift basket for a young lady who is heading to K-State this fall.

The second were party cookies for a young lady who will be headed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill and will be playing for their tennis team!

Until recently, my graduation philosophy is simple - AVOID the BLACK mortarboard at all costs!  In fact, when I made these cookies for my best friend to celebrate her time in college, I told her to just toss the all black mortarboard because the food coloring needed to saturate the royal icing makes it taste so terrible and colors your mouth for hours.

HOWEVER, since I have discovered the beauty of glaze... I now know that there is a yummy alternative.  For some reason, it only takes a drop of food coloring to blacken glaze, and as a result, it doesn't have any impact on the flavor of the icing!  ;^) So, now, the mortarboard is back into the cookie rotation!  And it looks so rich and shinny too! 

Congratulations ladies!

Cheers and Best Wishes!

Sarah

Couture Cookie Collection for Glam Gals

Earlier this Spring, I was challenged by a cookie customer to bake some "Couture Cookies" for her high-fashion friends as party favors for a shopping/beach trip.

As my normal uniform is a pair of jeans and an old sorority t-shirt, this was a both a cultural and cookie stretch for me! ;^)

Thanks to my good friend Google and some AMAZING cookie artists out there, this is what I came up with for her!

All packed up and ready to go to the beach!

The full extent of my "Couture" knowledge was summed up in this Christian Louboutin shoe cookie. Way back in my brain, I had stored an article from the Wall Street Journal about trademarking the color red.   

I also have a relative, my husband's father's cousin's daughter, Whitney, who lives in California, who had these fancy shoes for her AMAZING wedding... that you can read all about on this Every Last Detail post.  (She probably knows someone famous, since she and I are only four degrees of separation apart!)  

But they were to beautiful to try to cookie, so enough about shoes, and more about cookies...

These Chanel logo cookies were copied from Oh, Sugar!  Her amazing Chanel party should not be missed!  She was also smart enough to use royal icing transfers, but I kept breaking mine and just ended up using push pins to mark the ends and the joints of each C and then drawing each one.  (This trick would also work for your Olympic Rings!)  You do have to get it right the first time though, because you CANNOT scrape the black off the white quilting.

I also learned the quilting from two very helpful tutorials:

• Quilted Cookie Tutorial  from Haniela's
• Quilted Cookie Tutorial  from Amber at Sweet Ambs as a guest post on celebrations.com

Since I was covering with white, I didn't draw lines on my cookies.  Instead, I traced the circle on a piece of cardstock and marked my lines with a ruler that extended past the edge of the cookie.  That way, when I was icing, I could visually line up the diagonals to keep my lines straight.

The Louis Vuitton cookies were inspired by this amazing cookie artist: Kava Dolce, which I found on the Art of Cookie website.  (Her bags are AMAZING!  I have no idea how she does those, but with some help from this Luster Dust Tutorial by Hani at Haniela's I pulled these off.  I used a pearl luster dust on the base and a gold on the logo and the  accents.

My customer wanted "Little Black Dress" cookies.  I tried to warn her against the taste of black icing... but she definitely wanted the dresses, so I ventured into more unknown territory and tried my hand at glaze.  So I borrowed a tried and true glaze recipe from my dear friend Shari, and thanks to some encouragement from Cristin at Cristin's Cookies and this WONDERFUL tutorial on glaze with Cristin and Arty MaGoo, I gave it a whirl!






I ended up deciding that I preferred to let the glaze run off the sides and the bottom edge of the cookies so that it would wrap around and look more like a dress.  The best news... glaze only takes a tiny bit of food coloring to get dark black, so they tasted great!

I also gussied them up a bit by adding a tiny ribbon around the waist! ;^)  (That is Kansasan for "making them fancy.")






However, when it comes to beach wear, the big floppy hat and shades are more my style.  I created these as "special extra" cookies for my customer!

While I was at it, I made some flip flops too!  They were a perfect touch for two other projects: one for Teacher Appreciation Week, which I will blog about next time...

... and the other for these adorable "Mother-Daughter Flip Flops" for my flip-flop-loving, glaze-recipe provider, dear friend Shari, who had just finalized the adoption of her foster-daughter Willow!   They are based on my favorite flip flops of the summer from Charming Charlies!

(The big ones were a flip-flop cutter, but I made the little ones out of a jellybean cutter!) ;^)

Have a great day!
Cheers~
Sarah