Remember when you were a kid and your grandparents lived like 7 jillion miles away and you were pretty sure the drive took at least a week? And that was back before they had things like DVD players in cars, or ipods or running water. So all you had to make time go faster was something called "The Alphabet Game." And when they took down the billboard for "Quality Inn" 3 towns over, the only option you had left was watching for the mile markers and pretending like you were deaf so you didn't end up in the middle of some boy argument about dinosaurs. Except, on the way back...if you shut your eyes for just a second...you magically appeared in your own driveway.
And then you grow up. And get all adult-y. And go to college classes with 900 other people. And staying awake during class is not only not possible because of all the...umm..."studying" you were doing the night before, but it's not even desirable anymore. You know, because you're just going to "study" later that night anyway, so you may as well take a little bit of a nap while surrounded by those 900 other people and still wearing your shoes. So you give in and try to wiggle into some kind of slunk-down diagonal position that will at least hold your head vaguely upright so if they aren't paying close attention, someone might just think that you're pondering the very, very, uninteresting thing your professor just said about the history of dirt. And then you close your eyes for just a second...and when you open them again...it turns out that you've very nearly gone back in time and this class really is going to last for the rest of your life.
Sometimes as a mother I wish I could slow time down like that again. But it seems that my life is a series of closing my eyes and waking up weeks later. Take for example, these nest cookies. I made them a lifetime ago... before St. Patrick's Day even. I'm pretty sure it was still during the time of my life referred to as "February." And I'm only NOW just showing you how I made them. I don't even understand what happened during the time in between. I think it has something to do with an hour of my life simply evaporating while I was sleeping and some snow and maybe a little bit of McGoo U thrown in there as well. But even though I'll probably never figure out what happened in the vortex...I've still got these nest cookies to share!
1. Use a bat cutter to cut off the top of an Easter Egg cutter before baking. (You could also get close by shortening a tulip cutter!)
2. Use medium consistency brown icing and a #3 tip to outline and fill the bottom half of the cookies. Let it dry for 30 minutes.
3. Pipe an egg in the center of the nest with medium consistency blue icing. Let it dry for 15 minutes.
4. Add two more eggs on the outside of the nest. Let the cookie dry for an hour.
5. Water down some of the brown icing. It should be pretty close to water. Like, if you dropped some of it back on itself, it would smooth out immediately. Use a clean toothbrush to flick the brown icing all over the eggs. Don't worry if it gets on the nest. We're going to cover that up.
6. Use thick brown icing and a #2 tip to create branches for the nest.
See it in action.
I modified the design a little by adding moss before piping the branches on the nests in this set.
Find the burlap tutorial here.
See how I made the Easter Basket Cookies.
