Following a particularly wet winter, California is officially drought-free! I think any native Californian meets this news with both gratitude as well as a little skepticism. I’ve lived here most of my life, and I can’t remember a time when we weren’t experiencing some degree of drought...
Hello! Welcome back to Practice Bakes Perfect! I feel like I may be starting to sound like a broken record, but I was really wowed by the entries to our Lambeth-inspired challenge. I was afraid that maybe, just maybe, I had overreached with this challenge...
Hello, cookiers, sweets businesses, and cookie aficionados! Want to make your mark on my landmark cookie event? Well, you can! I’ve got some great sponsorship opportunities surrounding my televised 3-D cookie art competition at Show Me Sweets (July 13-14), including...
It's hard to believe, I know, but wedding season has kicked off! (Last I looked, it was just Christmas!) If you're in the cookie biz, this means you're probably already burning the midnight oil, cranking out hundreds of wedding and bridal shower cookie favors - and cursing yourself for...
There's nothing like a little challenge to get the creative juices flowing and to push oneself to new design heights! With five Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge entrants and one Cake International gold award-winner on this week's hot list*, this Spotlight is certainly testament to this fact. But, regardless of whether you were competing or just decorating for fun when you created these cookies, you...
First, my apologies (especially to Timea) for getting seriously behind on these Close-ups! My 3-D cookie competition planning and some personal distractions (mostly my home renovation) have left me with little time for anything else! But onward – this interview with...
Okay, if you've been on the fence about my 3-D cookie art competition, now's the time to jump off! Reminder: It's taking place this year at the Show Me Sweets show in St. Charles, Missouri (20 minutes or so from St. Louis) on July 13-14. A major TV network is turning the 3-D part into a TV documentary, and...
I'm up in Maine this weekend, checking on my long-distance home renovation, and it's as if I've been transported back in time by a month or two. When I left my house in St. Louis on Friday, it was a balmy 60°F, I'd shed my winter coat in favor of a light jacket, and I was giving happy nods to my daffodils and hellebores as I...
Hi, everyone! After a whirlwind CookieCon 2019, I'm finally home and (partially) recovered from the overwhelming amount of sweetness encountered in Reno! I'm also bearing a big gift...
Easter is just around the corner, so I thought I’d make a chocolate Easter bunny cookie (or an egg with a pair of ears, in actuality)! This project is super easy, as it's done simply by combining basic cookie cutter shapes and decorating techniques. We'll use egg cutters to make the bunny's face and ears, and then we'll...
The internet is such a treasure trove of cookie design material. Across all of the different social media platforms, we have an unending stream of art right at our fingertips. Years ago, while scrolling through some images on Pinterest, I came across these beauties...
It used to be, back when I was growing up, that moms memorialized their love of their kids in painstakingly traced and cut black silhouettes. Today (sadly), the immediacy of cell phone pics seems to have replaced that wonderful ritual of portrait-posing and the art itself...
Hippity, hoppity, Easter's on its way! Yes, indeed, the site is overrun with Easter cookies, and each day they seem to multiply even faster than the progeny of the Easter bunny ;)! This Spotlight is testament to the fact that...
Thank you all for participating in the most recent questionnaire in my Sugar Dot Surveys series. In it, I wanted to find out how thick you roll your cookie dough. I also wanted to know if you use any tool(s) to help achieve a consistent thickness, and why you use the tool(s) that you do...
Top o' the morning to you! You must have found a four-leaf clover, because you just stumbled upon a huge pot of gold! This Spotlight is a veritable treasure trove of St. Patrick's Day ideas, about half of which are brand new to the site. The other photos...
