The Solar System

I don't paint. I am learning to draw, but even that comes very slowly. If you tell me to paint something, I might do an acceptable job, but I dread having to invent also the topic.

So I cheated.

Once upon a time I was looking for a job at a kindergarten. As a prop for my show lesson I pepared watercolour planets. That was not very difficult. I had a wikipedia picture to copy and the planets were mostly straight lines and dots, nothing fancy. It was (almost) a pleasure to paint.

So I did it again, but not on cardstock; this time on cookies.

There is the Sun, a mixture of yellow and orange:

 There is Venus - very pale, which took me by surprise. Just believe me it is not white. In reality it is very pretty, but my camera and my camera skills are not so pretty:

There is Jupiter, of which I am particularly proud:

There is Saturn, using a pumpkin cookie cutter, because I only have serrated ovals:

Well, there is the whole Solar System:

Yes, no Pluto. About 2006 scientist decided, that Pluto is not a planet. If it was, then Moon would also have to be a planet. And that would be pure madness.

Sun will be eaten by caterpillars and then there will be no more summer!

I am lazy.

I had a nice idea for this challenge almost right away. I still have a list of things I want to try during this year of cookie-making. Today I even had an idea for December. I don't know what the challenge will be, but I know that in December I want to make my first cookies to be given away at my friends' cafe, which will be two years old. The owners don't know yet of my plan, but I still have time both to tell them and to produce cookies for them.

Anyway, back to me being lazy. I made cookies. A lot of cookies - bananas, watermelons, flowers, caterpillars, leaves... But then I procrastinated on actually decorating them, so by the time I got to making RI, they were mostly gone.

Lesson learned - better use regular size sugar (or even "gruba rafinada") than the fine kind. The suns and caterpillars mostly look like the surface was rough, but not sparkly. Possibly this is for the better, but it is not exactly the look I planned.

So beware of caterpillars! They will eat our sun and then there will be no more summer!

I need better planning

Again, I am writing last minute.

I did make cookies. I took the first photo, the one with the necklace and recreated it in cookies. A practice in precision piping (the yellow swirls). But. Again - but. Before I made photos, I took them to my son's kindergarten party. I really need to focus more on planning.

I wanted to prepare those cookies once more, but. Another but. My son got a stomach bug. Today was the first thay of this week that he ate anything and not vomited it. Or that he wanted to eat at all. One evening we even went to ER, because he vomited so heavily, that I estimated he did not even take any fluids for a whole day and night. Not a good topic for a cookie contest post.

And to add insult to injury, the evening we spent at the ER was my birthday. I am exhausted and in huuuge need of comfort food. So here is my take on comfort food (chocolate chip cupcakes with whipped cream) and, at the same time, my second idea for Lilaloa's challenge. Yes, that whipped cream is grey. My very first coloured food was in fact grey whipped cream. A friend of mine said that it looks like plaster, but since I made it, he will try it (because all things food that I make are great). Here it gives a steampunky look. and the  open star tip made it look almost like spiderwebs. The blue flowers were actually made from leftover royal icing after the "inspired" batch of cookies and nicely disturb otherwise boring decoration. Not my best, but good enough given my level of energy.

But you know what? My old camera, the one I hate, apparently can do customized white balance! The photo was taken in the evening, with a bit of sun from left and a bit of lamplight from right and it still is better than most my photos!

Bugs for mothers' day

My parents are fixing their garden and they asked us to come on Saturday and help. The thing is, in my funny country Mother's day is immobile, always on 26th May, so I couldn't go bare-handed. And I remembered that on Friday morning.

My point is - I had little time to plan, little time to make and even less to take photos, because what was left on Saturday, today went to my MIL. To make up for the poor quality of photos, here you are the prettiest cookie decorator in the world, right in the middle of decorating and eating. Finally mommy is not angry about eating pens!

Recently I got a couple of fun tools: a rolling pin with adjustable rings (you can't buy just the rings in Poland), serrated round and oval cookie cutters, and wedding and bugs Wilton's cookie cutters. Did you know those are NOT stainless steel? I know now...

For the mothers I wanted to make some bugs, but last moment decided against spiders. Kids love spiders, my mother hates them even more than I do. So here we are, dragonflies, bees, ladybugs with too many dots, some leaves and my son's new favourite: caterpillars. There were also butterflies, but those didn't work well.

Winter ball cookie

 Again, I didn't have the cookie cutter and forgot to check the proportions. From what I see on the site, somebody already had the same idea, but really, I did it independently.
 My other ideas are also one way or another in the submissions... I thought about making a boy's face with a scarf and a flower-pot with orchids (because I have mad orchids that bloom continuously). But here you have my take on a ball with snow. In order to make the snowflakes more visible, I placed them on a second layer of icing, so at least one significant difference from my predecessor. On, and my technique is sooooo bad here...

Puzzleball cookie

 I don't have the dimond ring cookie cutter, so I decided to imitate it with a circle ans a triangle. But I forgot to check how it should look. I remembered the diamond was disproportionally large, but didn't really think to check it before I made cookies. And last month I had so much to do, that I didn't have time to make new cookies. Or even check what other people invented for this challenge. Well, if I did visit the site to see ofher people's ideas, I definately would have seen the real proportions of the cookie cutter.
 I had a few ideas, but too little time to really make them into cookies, so in fact I made just the two of them, which required the same color palette.

 The first one is, partly to commemorate Autism Awareness Month, a Puzzleball. They are relatively new here, and I used to have one with the globe. My son was suspected to have autism. His story is long and heartbreaking, I'll try to make it as short as possible.
 Until he was 8 months old, he was a normal baby. Then he had some unknown infection, was hospitalized, but doctors discharged him to home while he was still ill. Two weeks later he went back to the hospital, this time with life-threatening encephalitis. He survived it and slowly regained eyesight, feeling in his body and control over the limbs. Finally, wbout 6 months later, his hearing returned. In the meantime he was diagnosed with Krabbe disease and is his genetician's first Krabbe patient to survive more than 3 months from diagnosis.
 He could hear, but he didn't understand the sounds, that he heard. He had no means of comunication other than crying and no children around to relate to, so psycologists said he is likely autistic. However, after half a year of therapy with another child, he begun imitating the other boy and then started communicating using gestures. Now he uses a mixture of PECS and Makaton and seems normal for all people, who don't see him regularly enough to notice him being suspiciously reticent.

Anyway, my puzzleball cookie:

Birthdays and cookies go hand in hand

 Apparently I had a very busy month. I forgot to post the other animal cookies I made trying to learn wet-on-wet. So here are two more examples: butterflies and some patterns (because, obviously, the birds use a different approach):

 But the real reason that April was very busy was my son's fourth birthday. I made him some Owl cookies for Kindergarten and learned, that somehow my icing is too thick for a no. 1 tip. And here I was so happy, that I found a shop that carried more baking supplies (in the meantime I decided to leave my former favourite shop, because two times in a row they sent me an incomplete order and didn't bother telling me, that they ran out of something I wanted. If you own a shop remember: you loose clients when you think for them. If there is something wrong with the order, you call and ask them BEFORE you send anything. Not wait until they get the package and are angry with you).

 J's sign in kindergarten is Owl, so I had to make Owl cookies. In the beginning I wanted to make Dumbo cookies, because he could watch Dumbo trhree times in a row (he has auditory verbal agnosia, so he likes only films with little dialogue, like Dumbo or Wall-E) and throw a tantrum if I stopped the film for any reason whatsoever. However, a week before his birthday he got bored with Dumbo.

 I made these similarly to the geographical hearts, but this time I cut the template to trace the shape on the cookies, making them more consistent.

Then we had not one, but two parties (ok, not real parties, more like family&friends gatherings), so I had to make two cakes and last minute decided to throw in a big bowl full of cookies, so the children would have something more to eat while throwing all the toys around the house. There were some spiders covered by leaves, flowers and canaries (J got a canary for his birthday), but the minute the boys discovered the spiders, everybody wanted these cookies. 

 All in all, I did prepare some diamond-ring-shaped cookies, but had time to decorate them only two days ago. And even then I did it with my baby-girl running around and crying for a cookie. Just four months ago she didn't like the taste and now she would eat them whole day long... So off I go to write a few words about my ideas for the dimond ring cookie cutter.