Learn how to make some brightly colored parrot decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!  I've decided that I'm going to stop using the word "homeschooling" to describe what is currently happening in my home. I think it's giving homeschooling a bad reputation. " Checking my email 71 times a day and rapid fire negotiating with my four children simultaneously while trying to also download new learning apps and find lost logins before they realize we are 27 minutes past our scheduled time for their nutritious afternoon snack and everyone devolves into an exploding slush of anger and resentment " ...just seems a little long though.

Learn how to make some tropical chameleon decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!  Would you say that you "like to go grocery shopping" or that you "like to grocery shop?" I'm not good with grammar. I have a book that tells me the rules, but it's about eleventy-jillion pages long and I can never find what I'm looking for, because in all honesty... I don't know what all those words mean. Participle? Conjunction? Can you even say those words out loud in polite company? Also... what exactly IS "polite company?"

Learn how to make some easy and adorable llama face decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!   I just want to go on record here today and say that - I ACTUALLY USED LEFTOVER TOMATO SAUCE BEFORE IT MOLDED. I know. I know. It's never been done before.

Learn how to make some adorable sloth decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!   When I made my very first decorated cookie - I lived alone in Colorado. My husband was deployed. I had one child. And one friend. And cookies were sugar.... so really - I had TWO friends. When I moved to South Korea and had to give up making cakes entirely and started making cookies for REAL and not just for kidding any more... I was still just a girl and her sugar. I had a Ziploc bag full of cookie cutters. And a baking sheet that could fit six cut-outs at a time. At that time, this new wave of cookie decorating was really just beginning. And by "new wave," I mean -- cookies that were CRAZY adorable and still delicious at the same time. For decades, cookie decorating had either been one or the other. The cookies looked good OR they tasted good. And suddenly - you could have both. As it turns out...people kind of liked that whole thing. Since the fir...

Learn how to make some adorable and fun sheep or lamb decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!   I never know how to explain what I do to people. When they ask, I usually tell them something super clever like -  "Stuff." But since people typically don't understand all the details and nuances that I've associated with that word throughout the entire history of my existence, it usually requires a follow up along the lines of, "I make cookies every day of my life."

Learn how to make some simple Easter Bunny decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!   Every winter, I live in fear of my computer breaking down. Because that means I will have to take it to an actual person that uses words like “hard drive” and “ram” and “Why is there gold in the card reader?” But really... my biggest fear is that secretly they will check my internet history and see all of my internet research for "electric pants" and misunderstand my purpose.

Learn how to make some adorable moose decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!! Things have slowed down a little bit for me after the Christmas rush. As it turns out, my kitchen counters still exist under all that royal icing. I've gone to bed before midnight... ON PURPOSE... multiple times! For better or worse, I finally discovered where that smell was coming from. I even managed to do enough laundry that I can now wear matching socks...and not just in public. Things are REALLY starting to look up for me.

  Use this cookie decorating tutorial to learn how to make cute and adorable giraffe sugar cookies!! When I was younger, I worked as a sailboat instructor at a summer camp that was on the shores of a very large lake. In the afternoons, I would take groups of campers out on one of the two yacht size sailboats that the camp owned. We would sail around for hours and come back just in time for dinner. I was LIVING THE LIFE.

Remember when you were little and your parents had friends and you were like, " WHAAAAAT??!! You can't have friends. You're a grown-up and your life should be all about taking care of me and making me chocolate cupcakes and taking me on outings in the park and chalk drawings and... " And then your parents were all " Umm, no. That's Mary Poppins. And we are certainly not Mary Poppins. Or codfish. " And then you were all, " What's a codfish? I wanted cupcakes. " Yeah. As it turns out...I'm all grown up and still don't know what a codfish is. And I make my own cupcakes now. And I have friends that I try to hide from my children so that my children won't be scarred for life when they discover they aren't the complete totality of my life. Actually, that's a lie. I hide them from my children because my children like my friends more than they like me. I'm not even kidding. I just got back from a substantially long co...

I'm a "say what you mean and mean what you say" kind of girl. My children are not. They say things like, " I hate that shirt more than a million ." More than a million WHAT exactly? More than a million chocolate covered caramels piled on a silver tray with my name on it? Because then I would agree that I hate that shirt more than I hate a million chocolate covered caramels piled on a silver tray with my name on it. My girl child has started saying, " I don't have any shoes ." You know, while standing in a pile of shoes that reaches from her closet to her bedroom door. *I* don't even own that many shoes. Or they say, " You NEVER EVER make food I like ." You can imagine that in the history of their little lifetimes that I've never once made pizza or hotdogs or quesadillas or chocolate chip cookies or popcorn or french fries. Never ever apparently. And my personal favorite, " But ALL THE GIRLS have horses. I NEED one...

I'm kind of loving this whole "woodland" thing going on right now. I mean... I get to use colors with great contrast, and do no end of internet research on " the cutest little animals that ever existed. " Seriously...I lost hours of my life with that one google search. (Don't say I didn't warn you!) I mean... who KNITS a sweater for a tiny mouse... and how in the world did you get that on him?! And some people may argue WHY in the world... but I'm not a judger. And the little tiny monkey sucking his thumb? Stop me now - I'm getting sucked back in. The point is - I love a good internet research project. And I was ready for this one. I pre-heated my electric blanket and spent 20 minutes squeezing real, actual lemons for the best lemonade that ever existed. (I do NOT take internet researching lightly. Artificial lemonade would have been an offense to its very soul.) I got my kids in bed and stacked up extra pillows on the couch that faces aw...

 I basically live in fear of faces. Not like real faces with mouths that move and eyes that... actually, you know what? I'm creeping myself out just talking about this. My whole point here is that I hate making cookie faces. Eyeballs I'm okay with. I mean... you guys were with me during my whole " Eyeball All The Things " phase, right? But noses and mouths and all that...it terrifies me. Cookie faces just have so much potential to be both unbelievably adorable...or a complete and total train wreck. And really, I have no idea which way it will go. What we need is some kind of Encyclopedia of Cookie Faces. Or maybe we can convince all those adorable cookie face making people to join forces and get to work on www.1001cookiefaces.com. I mean...seriously, help us all out, will you? I'll contribute these raccoon faces. Because against all odds... I'm kind of in love with them! They are SO adorable!! I just want to squish them! Want to make some? 1. G...

Remember these cookies? What?! That was only last week...how could you have forgotten them so quickly? You must have "children" or "stress" or "that one thing where you forget things." You know what? It's okay. It wasn't really important anyway. Because I'm just talking about the paw prints today anyway. Sometimes it seems like the most simple designs are the most elusive. And these paw prints are no exception. I had a lot of questions about these cookies last week...and almost all of them were one of these two questions: Why don't you have craters? Why is there no color bleed? My first answer would be "it's a miracle" to both of those questions...but truthfully, I've never had either of those problems with paw print cookies. Color bleed can be avoided by letting the background dry for as long as possible before adding the paw print on top AND by using the thickest possible icing for that print...which inciden...

You know I love making cookies. ( PLEASE tell me that is not a surprise at this point. ) Some days I love sketching the designs very best. Some days mixing colors is my favorite thing in the world. Some days I'm most in love with the details that take my very mediocre and slightly disturbed design and turn into a cookie that people won't run from screaming. Oh! And you *know* I love smudging up a cookie. And when I see those cookies all laid out together on a platter like so many blossoms of a perfect spring hydrangea...I just can't wait to do it all again! Sometimes though... I kind of hate making cookies. I hate the dish washing. And the late night baking because I COMPLETELY forgot about those cookies until the second before I slipped into the oblivion of sleep. Sometimes I don't want to go digging through my endless and utterly disorganized cutter bins to find a cutter that I might not even have. And WHY do red and blue food color not always make purple??!!! A...

I'm not a good holiday understander-er. I don't really get why its okay for strangers give my children candy in little buckets while they wander around the neighborhood in the dark on Halloween. How did THAT happen? I mean, I have done AT LEAST 20 minutes of research on that holiday, and I still can't figure it out. Or what about having an entire day dedicated to watching magic wildlife look at itself or its shadow or whatever it does and then decide if it would like to single-handedly change the seasons. OR a holiday where you are basically expected to put kool-aid in the shower head and serve your family dinner that's really a dessert, but it looks like dinner just to celebrate the fact that once again the first day of April came after the last day in March. Oh, and I think that if you are still single, you have pretend to be engaged for at least a day. It might be a rule. You should check. And....obviously... Easter. Have you seen the Easter decorations at th...