Oh, How Sweet it is To Be Loved

Love is in the air!

I LOVE this time of year. I know I am totally crazy for saying that right? Mother Nature has been pissed off for over three weeks, dumping snow on us every other day causing all types of chaos but I don’t really care because I still love the month of February!

Not only is it my birthday this coming weekend, but it’s Valentine’s Day! Louis and I don’t usually do too much for V-Day.. Last weekend we took a trip to NYC and spent two nights eating the finest foods and walking at least ten miles a day to sight-see and just revel in the excitement of the city!  That was supposed to be our Valentines Day gift to each other but this morning he impulsively told me to make reservations at Barcelona Wine Bar Saturday night for dinner.. What!! I am so spoiled! 

I love Valentine’s because it is the best time of year for baking! I have so much fun with cakes, cookies, cake pops all in lovely pinks and reds with decadent flavors such as red velvet cinnamon and chocolate raspberry.  I have many orders in the works for the next few months.. so I decided to get into the spirit a few days early by sharing some sugar cookies I did last weekend. 

These were for a Valentine’s Day themed baby shower! How adorable, right?  

The more I practice flooded cookies, the better I get for sure. I love doing it, but it certainly is labor intensive and requires so much patience! I don’t want to let them dry I just want to keep going!! 

Tonight I get to work on another fun order of cupcakes for a catering company who is putting on a Valentine’s Day beer tasting in Springfield, MA! Can’t wait to share!

Stay warm, people of New England! It may be snowy but love will keep you warm! 

-Elena

The Floodgates Have Been Opened...

This week I finally completed something I have wanted to do for a very long time-- flooding cookies!

I have read so much about cookie flooding and royal icing and watched so many youtube videos and I am absolutely fascinated with these cookies! The possibilities are limited to the cookie cutters you have but after that, they are endless! So many colors, shapes, flavors... I was asked by a neighbor if I could make some sugar cookies for her son and daughter-in-law's "Gender Reveal" party this weekend, and of course I said "Sure I can do those!" No, Elena. You can't possibly know you can do them, you've never done them! BUT, I am an experimenter and my skills are becoming more refined so I went for it!

First, I had to create the dough. I used a recipe for a thicker sugar cookie, one that could withstand heavy royal icing.  Three cups of flour, 2 sticks of butter, some sugar, an egg and some extract is all it takes to get a nice crumbly dough. I decided on pure almond extract for a flavoring, as I think it is a more mature flavoring than the boring, old vanilla.  I wanted these things to smell mouthwatering.. and the dough was just that. Smelled SO GOOD. So I kneaded the dough and rolled it out and cut out some adorable shapes...

How cute are the onesies!!??! Then, I mentally tied my hands behing my back (for no other reason than to stop myself from shoving all this delicious, almondy, buttery dough into my mouth) and threw these suckers in the oven. 350 degrees for 9 minutes.

Boom. Done. Beautiful little rattles and bibs!

Now it was time for some royal icing. Royal icing is very heavy and thick, but it contains NO oil like a buttercream icing does, so it hardens like candy and is used for piping decorations and when watered down, for flooding! So I whipped some up. Meringue powder, some water, corn syrup (for shine) and some almond extract.

I used this to outline each cookie.  You need the heavy icing to keep the "flood" in the cookie! So you outline the cookie first, then take the rest of the icing and water it down to the consistency of Elmer's school glue.  Then I had to color it with my beautiful Atecco, water based icing colors.  So gorgeous.

 AAAAAANDDDD the flooding began! I flooded onesies.

I flooded rattles... baby elephants... I flooded bibs.. I flooded everything.

Flood Flood Flood. It's like playing with glue as a child in kindergarten. The onesies were just my favorite. In case you are wondering how I got the designs.. Once you flood the cookie, while it is still wet you drop in another color, then you can use a toothpick to swirl it or cut it to makes tye-dye or hearts!  I added some cute sugar pearls as buttons and some candy hearts as bows. It is always the fine details that really get people's attention.

And.. finished product! 

 

My lines are not perfect on the edge.. but other than that I am super happy with how they came out, especially being that this is my first time ever flooding. I will definitely do it again soon... I think I have created a monster here... the floodgates are open... let the cookie flooding obsession begin. 

-Elena