I don't know about you guys, but I just can't make myself turn on my oven right now. It's like my oven is telepathic. If I even get out my sketch book and cutters, it somehow heats my house up another 10 degrees. And then I get all heat lethargic and have to crawl around looking for water and refuge. Which is awkward because it doesn't seem to affect my children.

You guys know this is my favorite day of the month! I get to peruse my cousin's fantastic paper creation blog and then recreate one of them in sugar form. I actually made these awhile and I have been SAVING them for some reason that even I don't comprehend. And also I may have forgotten I had them for awhile. But here we are with some of the cutest, most adorablest sea creature cookies I've ever made. Which is not a surprise considering I used this CUTEST BEYOND WORDS crab card as my inspiration!!!! WHY did I not also make the flower?! (Because I'm just awful at flowers, that's why. But next time...Imma brave it anyway. It's just too cute.) 1. Bake yourself a crab shaped cookie. You can eat one of them if you want to. I won't tell. 2. Using thick black icing and a #2 tip, outline the entire cookie. For some reason, I thought it made sense to leave gaps for the eyes. But...it doesn't. Just outline the whole thing. Let the outline dry for ...

There was a time in my life that summers meant sailboats. Little tiny one person sailboats that I could carry all by myself....Sailboats I made out of spare parts and fiberglass....Catamaran sailboats that would fly practically sideways through the water...Big ol' sailboats with booms and giant genoa sails that you could sleep in for days. I taught people to sail and took people on sailing tours and I raced sailboats and very nearly won... and I never thought I would find something that made me that happy. And then, guess what? There are a MILLION fantastic things in this life! Like getting married and crazy kids and living in South Korea and whitewater rafting and rock climbing and making cookies and MAKING COOKIES WITH COOKIE FRIENDS!!! I just spent this weekend hanging out with cookie friends and filming some shows for McGoo U. And basically, I'm high on life right now. I wish I could share this week with all of YOU! But since I can't, I'm going to share saili...

24 thoughts I had before 10 am.  1. Please tell me it's only 4am and that I can sleep for 2 more hours. 2. Seriously? How is it already 6? 3. Maybe if I put this pillow over my head, my girls will go back to sleep. 4. They can probably get breakfast by themselves, right? 5. Wait. Is that the sound of cereal hitting the kitchen floor? 6. Of course it's their favorite cereal. 7. I guess I'll wear this shirt. It doesn't have any icing on it. 8. Today is the day I'm going to finally clean out that storage closet. 9. AAAHH!! That cookie order is due tomorrow morning not next week! 10. Gosh, I hope I have butter. 11. I love you butter. Thank you for being there. 12. I can't remember what colors I need to mix. Let me just jump online and check... 13. And I'll just check Facebook real quick too. 14. Real quick? As if. 15. Facebook bugs me. 16. I really should just turn it off and get to making those cookies. 17. Seriously, what is Facebook's ...

My daughters are experimenting with "baking".  Basically they pull a lot of stuff out of the cupboards and try to convince me to use them all in a single recipe. Sometimes I let them mix their "own bowl" of "baking" while I'm secretly mixing actual ingredients in another bowl. And by "actual ingredients" I mean "ingredients that I can mix together without having a physical reaction." So...for example NOT pickles, Tobasco sauce and peach preserves.

  Fair warning -- this post if full of all kinds of unsolicited advice. Proceed with caution. Icing consistency is kind of a big deal. It can create the perfect dimension and texture if you get it right or dash all your cookie icing dreams to pieces if you don't take the time to get it exactly as thick or thin as it needs to be. How do you know how thick it should be? Think about the design and what you need the icing to do. Should it flow together or keep it's texture? Are you filling an entire cookie or just a small space? THIN ICING (also known as flood icing or 10 second count) is for covering large areas with smooth icing. It's thin though, so you'll need to contain it with a thicker icing. MEDIUM ICING (also known as one-consistency or 15 count) is for outlining and filling a cookie with the same consistency of icing. MEDIUM THICK ICING (also known as puffy icing or 17 count icing) is great for filling small spaces that might crater, for a...

It seems like graduation just sneaks up on me every year. I mean...one day it's snowing 12 inches and then just a couple of weeks later...everyone is being all grown up and graduating and moving on to all the amazing things they are going to do with their lives. And then it's summer.  And I'm terrified I'm going to wake up and it will be Halloween and my kids won't have any costumes so I'll have to run out to find something at the very last minute, only every thing good is already gone and when I look around everyone is staring at me with their judging eyes because I clearly don't love my children enough to plan ahead. So my children will end up wearing black fabric across their shoulders while pretending to fly around like bats. Again. Luckily, I always have enough chocolate on hand to sustain a small brigade of mothers and children for roughly a month...so at least I won't have to worry about the trick-or-treaters.... as long as I can find s...

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...

Once upon a time, I didn't know how to make cookies that looked like anything but a sadly mishapen chocolate chip cookie. And then I watched a hundred million hours of a magical thing called YouTube videos and became an expert in practically everything, but most importantly SUGAR creating things. And it kind of created a little cookie making monster out of me. And I liked that. The end.