oh, sugar cookies, how do i love thee?

Let me count the ways.

I whipped up these little guys yesterday for teacher gifts
while happily chatting with Adrienne (great to see her again!).
I like how the colors came out, but the icing never hardened enough 

to stack them, and even saran wrap smooshed things up. 

Not sure what went wrong. I may have to go back to good ol' royal icing.

flowers abound

Here's the finished product!
I made these with the Wilton Stackable Flower cookie cutter set.
It comes with the base flower shape, a petal shape, and the bee.
The stems are just candy sticks -- they're paper, but they bake up fine.
I used Martha Stewart's recipe for cookies & icing, and here's what I learned:
I like the cookies better with salted butter than unsalted, because the
icing really sweetens things up. Also, using brandy instead of milk makes
the dough easier to work when it comes out of the fridge. Finally, I prefer
sugar cookies when they're 1/4" thick instead of 1/8". You have to cook 'em
a little longer to get that golden edge, but it makes for a good, soft center.
Oh -- the thing I'm most excited about with these is that I figured out how to
color them without any chemical food dyes. The purple is from frozen
blueberries, and the yellow bee is from turmeric (with chocolate stripes).
How cool is that?

Here's a classroom's worth of sugar cookies.
It's been my art project for the week, and yes, if I start
complaining about not having enough time to paint,
you can remind me of this.

martha stewart made my day

Today we had a little boy birthday party for Elliott.
He's been looking forward to this all summer, since the girls
have happily shared all their birthday lore with him and
hosted many a pretend birthday party. It was so cute to catch
his smile while everyone was singing Happy Birthday to him --
he recognized that this was the moment he'd been waiting for.
Fortunately for me, I found Martha Stewart's Monkey-Party-in-a-box
on clearance 5 months ago, so all I had to do was send out the
monkey invitations and put out the monkey cups.
Of course, I couldn't pass up making these monkey cupcakes
from the February edition of Martha Stewart magazine.
I adapted mine a little, using marzipan (which I love) instead of fondant
for the face shapes. Now, how fun is that?