Lots of Christmas cookies & a Christmas gift for me!

Well, it's only a few more days until Christmas now!  Almost all the presents are wrapped (still have a few last minutes gifts to get today) and I am pretty much done with holiday baking!  I can't wait to see all our family for Christmas!  I am of course bringing the sweet stuff for Christmas day so I have been a busy little baker the past couple of days and nights!  I luckily have an amazing husband who has tolerated my mess and helped by cleaning the dishes!  

It's the first day of winter today and there is no snow on the ground!  I am actually pretty happy that there won't be a lot of snow this holiday!  I definitely don't like driving in the snow.  However, I have been seeing on the news that the west and midwest have just gotten a ton of snow!  I hope everyone is being safe out there and staying home as much as possible during the bad weather!  

I am so busy today, so there will not be any recipe or anything too long, but I wanted to share some Christmas cookies that I have been making lately!  There are a lot of pictures so I hope you enjoy!  I still have a few more that I am finishing today, so hopefully I will be able to put pictures of those up soon!  

I am pretty much obsessed with Wilton's Pearl Spray!  You can find it at Michael's.  Just spray lightly over the cookies and they have this amazing shimmer!  The spray comes in gold and silver as well, but I have only tried the pearl so far!

Snowmen on a stick ready to be given as gifts!

More pictures of the snowflakes with pearl spray.  Just because I love them so much!

Ready to be given out as gifts!  

I was very excited to get a Christmas gift in the mail last week!  Check out this Kopy Kake that I got from Madison Art Shop!  They have everything an artist could want!  Check out their website!

They are on sale right now for a great price!  The shipping was so fast and it only cost $5!  No, that was not a typo.  $5 for shipping!  How amazing is that?!  I cannot wait to show you some of the things that I make with this after the holidays are over!  

I hope everyone is enjoying the last few days before Christmas!  Now, I am off to finish some cookies and do my last minute shopping!

Happy Halloween

I love Halloween!  First of all, I have probably already mentioned that Fall happens to be my favorite season! The weather starts to cool down, and it is the beginning of the holiday season that I love so much!  Halloween starts it off.  Well... it used to start it off!  Now that I am married and will be living in Canada, Thanksgiving is in the beginning of October here.  I really feel like I have the best of both worlds.  Thanksgiving is the ONLY holiday that we can spend with both of our families.  We are here in Canada with my husband's family for Canadian Thanksgiving.  Then, we get to go visit my family for American Thanksgiving.  This year we are going to Boston to visit my sister and brother in law who have recently bought a house.  Every other Thanksgiving in my life has been at my parent's house.  So, it will be a little different this year, but I am so excited to see my sister's new home!  

Last Halloween was the first year that I was able to buy candy and pass it out to trick or treaters.  Every year before that in my adult life, I have lived in an apartment building and you don't really get trick or treaters there.    

So back to last year.  First of all, the Steelers were playing.  I LOVE the Steelers.  They are my team, and they are not always on here in Canada.  It normally turns out that the Buffalo Bills are on 2 channels.  Really?  Couldn't one of you have chosen a different game... like the Steelers?!?  So, I was happy that the Steelers were playing.  6pm rolls around and I start to see some kids outside in their costumes.  No one was coming to our house!  It turned out that almost all of my neighbors were sitting at the end of their driveways with their bowls on candy.  No one was coming to my house because it obviously was too much work to walk up to my door when everyone else was sitting outside.  Also... it had SNOWED on Halloween!  It stopped by trick or treating time, but still.  

So... even though the Steelers were playing, off I went to get my chair from the garage to sit at the end of the driveway in my winter coat, with a blanket on to pass out candy.  You might be wondering where my lovely boyfriend (at the time) was.  Oh, he was inside wanting nothing to do with sitting outside in the cold and passing out candy to kids.  He came out briefly to bring me some hot tea.  The quickly went back inside to watch football.  

This year I will not be able to give out candy on Halloween.  I am a little disappointed, and then I remember that I won't be here on Halloween because I will be laying on the beach in the Caribbean with my husband for our honeymoon!

So I made some Halloween cookies this past week.  Hope you enjoy!

Large Happy Halloween cookie!

Lots of icing ready for decorating!

Dining room table filled up with cookies!

Candy corn, spiderwebs and pumpkins.  I was running out of room, so they were drying on the bench in the living room. 

All different colored spiderwebs. 

Candy corn!  Simple, yet one of my favorites!  I also LOVE the real thing!  I need to be good and not buy too much of it because it disappears very quickly!  

More spiderwebs.  Love the bright and vibrant colors!

Lots of pumpkins.

I love how these Jack O' Lantern cookies turned out!  They were a big hit too!

These fall leaves were inspired by the amazing Sugar Belle.  I have made these a lot.  They have been a big hit!  I now love using the color mists.  Makes me want to get an airbrush machine!

These ghosts were the most simple cookies I made, but I think they were one of the most popular with the kids.  

I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween!  I will be enjoying some candy on the beach for my Halloween.  :-)  

Bouquets and Coloring

This is the first cookie bouquet that I have made.  They were for my fiance's Grandma.  

This present cookie was my favorite!  I also LOVE these colors together!  I was not sure what her favorite colors were, so I just made them colors I would like.  :-)  

All wrapped up and ready to go!  :-)

I got all my cookie bouquet supplies from Karen's Cookies.  I get a lot of my supplies from there.  The cookie sticks, the cookie boxes, the plastic bags (that are on each individual cookie and then a big one around the whole cookie bouquet) and all the food color.  They have a lot of great stuff, and you can get it in small quantities as well!  

These are only SOME of my food colors.  I have plenty more now.  They are AmeriColor.  They are a food color gel, so they won't make you icing (or whatever you are making) runny or taste funny.  Plus, they give an intense color so you only have to use a little bit of coloring to get your desired color.  Before I started using these, I was using the Wilton's food coloring in a little jar that you can find at Michael's Craft Store.  Well, if I had to color something red or black, I basically had to use the whole jar to get the correct color!  Now, I use a fraction of that to get the color I want.  

School is out!

I am happy to say that I have been done with my schooling for a few years now, but I always loved the beginning of summer (especially because I didn't have to go to school for a few months!).  I went to school in Pennsylvania, and would normally be done around the first week of June.  However, here in Canada, school just got out last week!  June 29!  It's crazy to me!

Here are some cookies that I made for a lady who is giving these teacher cookies to her daughter's teachers, and the hearts on a stick to the kids in the class.  

I made apples, chalk boards, crayons and pencils.  

Everything is iced.  Now it must dry before I put the finishing touches on!

BLUE CRAYONS!

All done!!  These have to be some of my favorite cookies that I have made!  

Chalk board cookies.

Big red apple!

Here are the hearts to be given to the girl's classmates.  

All wrapped up and tied with a purple ribbon!

I love these cookie pops!  They make eating a cookie so much fun!  I had to make a couple extra so Jeff and I could enjoy one.  :-)