A friend of mine hosted a baby shower that was mustache-themed. HOW CUTE IS THAT? There are quite a few mustache cookie cutters out there, but I went with this one from Amazon.com due mostly to its primeness (2 day free shipping FTW). The cookies aren't too big, one batch of dough made about 55.
I set myself to decorating them whilst I watched the twitter-sensation Sharknado. (Only made it half way through before I finished the cookies. They were pretty quick and easy to ice.)
Outlined and ready to go!
Of course I doused them all with a heavy helping of disco dust. I'm a big fan of this cookie cutter. I will have to find another time to use it - maybe in Movember?
The first weekend in May is delightfully nerdy. The scene above was at my local comic book store Saturday morning for Free Comic Book Day. It also happened to be International Star Wars Day! (May 4th). Last year I really lamented not having my act together and doing something for May the 4th. I planned then and there to host a Star Wars marathon in 2013.
Saturday was crazy as I pretty much didn't do anything for the Star Wars party until that morning. I also had to cram in a trip to my local comic book store. I wanted to buy Brian K. Vaughan's new series Saga but the line was nuts when I arrived so I just looked through all the free comics instead. (My brother ended up buying Saga at his comic book store so win!) I had never been to the comic store before but it is pretty awesome. They have a large gaming section with a ton of great board games and a room with lots of tables so you can play them. I am definitely going to have to go back there soon.
I think I mentioned last year that I had some awesome Star Wars cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma. I have both the Heroes & Villains set and the Vehicle set. I originally had these grand plans of icing them all but since I waited until Saturday morning, that did not happen.
I think they look great un-iced. You can see all the detail much better than if I had iced them. On a slightly related side-note, Friday night I went to see John Hodgman do stand-up and Paul and Storm opened for him. I had heard of them before but never actually heard any of their music. THEY ARE FANTASTIC. Their songs are hilarious and a lot of them are about nerd culture. Here is one they sang Friday night called Thanksgiving that is pretty appropriate for May the Fourth. (Note: contains some curse words so may want to listen with headphones if you're in a public place.)
I definitely bought all of their CDs after the concert!
I knew I was short on time and I wanted to do some sort of cupcake. I decided making cupcake toppers was the easiest/least time consuming way to have fun themed cupcakes. (I also knew I'd be sitting around for a while waiting for the concert to start on Friday so I'd have time to cut out pictures.) I picked out 4 different iconic pictures (Han Solo, Darth Vader, R2D2, and the MillenniumFalcon) and pasted them into a powerpoint slide. It took a little googling to figure out how to rotate the pictures 180 degrees for the backside of the toppers. If you'd like to make your own toppers, here is a pdf version of what I had or you can choose your own images!
Alternatively, Williams-Sonoma does have cupcake kits that provides toppers and adorable cupcake papers. I just didn't have time to make it out to the store.
Of course I also sprinkled them with some star dust! (aka, disco dust). The last thing I attempted to do was carve a watermelon to look like the death star. (they make it look so easy on the internet!)
I was doing this AS guests were arriving and also using whatever I could find in my kitchen to carve so it didn't come out the best, but still cute! (Plus watermelon! YUM) If I ever do this again, I think I'll dig out my pumpkin carving set.
I wore this great woot shirt (which GLOWS IN THE DARK) for the occasion and started off with my hair in the Princess Leia side buns. They started falling out and Leia changes her hairdo each movie anyways, so I ended up with the Heidi braids by the end.
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!! As I said yesterday, Megan came over on Monday night to bake. We only got half of what we wanted done.
The Pretzel treats are by far the EASIEST. So quick to make! You lay out square pretzels and place a chocolate on top. (A lot of people use Hershey's Kisses, we used Wilton's melting chocolate wafers.)
I found dark chocolate raspberry flavored wafers at Michaels so I mixed those in too. We were cooking brownies at the same time so just put the pretzel chocolates in the oven for about 60 seconds or until the chocolate looked melty then placed a Valentine's M&M on top of each one.
Next we melted Wilton colored chocolate wafers (white and pink) in zip lock bags, cut off a tip and piped it on top of the pretzels. So cute and only takes about 10 minutes to make!
The brownies were a little more difficult. Our first batch didn't want to come out of the pan. (Even though I sprayed it with cooking spray!)
We used the same heart shaped cookie cutters from the sugar cookies to cut out heart brownies. I quickly realized that we weren't going to get a ton of brownies from this mix - and then we got even less when the brownies stuck to the pan.
I got a little smarter with the second batch and used the ever-trusty Wilton Cake Release to grease the pan and the brownies slid out perfectly.
There is so much scrap brownie when you're cutting out hearts... Cook's Treat!!
The lastly there's the sugar cookies. My old stand-by! Megan and I ran out of time to frost them on Monday so I did it last night while catching up on Downton. Sidenote: if you are also watching Downton, you HAVE to read the Facebook Recap. It's written as if the whole episode took place on Facebook and is HILARIOUS. Back to the cookies - The two designs I did weren't very intricate but still look great. It didn't take too long to do which was nice. And of course I sprinkled Disco-dust all over them. What's Valentine's Day with out a little SPARKLE??
Last year I made chocolate filled cookie cutters for my coworkers for Christmas. It's a pretty inexpensive present that's easy to make in bulk. I bought a set of 20 cookie cutters from Wal-mart and spread them out on wax paper. I used Wilton chocolate and peppermint candy melts to fill the cutters. I filled them 2/3 of the way with chocolate and then topped them off with peppermint for the "holiday pizzazz."
I let them chill over night then put them in gift bags and wallah! Fun for everyone!
