Last week, I got together with some friends for a cookie exchange. Who doesn't love friends, wine and dessert! Yum. I made some delicious carrot cake oatmeal cookies I found on the Betty Crocker website. So delicious. My husband also loved them, which means something, because he's not much of a dessert eater. Though, I love baking so there's always desserts around.
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Here are some of the other delicious cookies my friends made :)
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And of course we had to get a picture of all of us by the Christmas Tree!
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Thanks for a fun evening girls :)
 
A few weeks ago I decided to make good use of my Jayhawk cookie cutter that I have had for a year or so. I decided to make some sugar cookies from scratch using a recipe from the book Cookie Craft.  This book is awesome! It has fun ideas on how to make and decorate sugar cookies for all occasions. I also used their royal icing recipe with almond extract as the flavoring. So yummy!
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Plain sugar cookies cooled on wax paper.
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Made Royal Icing and placed in a piping bag in order to outline the cookie shape.
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Pipe the outline and let dry an hour or so.
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Flooded the parts of the Jayhawk that are red.
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Then filled in the yellow icing.
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The finished product! Adorable KU Jayhawk cookies!
 
I baked a few sugar cookies from scratch. Normally, I buy the pilsbury refrigated kind and roll them out, but I was looking for a challenge. They turned out great and taste yummy without frosting. It was exciting to finally use a bunch of my 100 box of cookie cutters.
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Sugar Cookies
 I have always wanted to learn how to make really pretty and ornate details on cookies. Ever since I started my cake decorating classes, I knew I wanted to tackle cookies next. So I ordered a new cookie book called Cookie Craft from Amazon. It only took a few days to get here. It has lots of ideas on how to decorate cookies for all the different holidays.
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I made royal icing in different colors. Filled some pastry bags and ta da..this is what i ended up with.
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Since I didn't have a squeeze bottle to flood the cookies I used a toothpick to spread the icing around and man that took forever. Next time I'm going to pick me up a squeeze bottle. The two cookies below are my favorite, with the zig zag type design.
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The double heart cookie is royal icing with red sugar sprinkles on top and then I piped dots around the edges. Overrall, I think I did a good job for my first cookie decorating experiment.
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