When I was a teenager, I had a bit of an obsession with semiprecious stones. Malachite, with its brilliant greens and hypnotic swirls, was my absolute favorite. I had an entire collection of malachite treasures...
Fall (or I should say autumn, as it sounds more like the Italian word "autunno") is one of my favorite seasons. I love the explosion of warm colors on the tree leaves, especially on those sunny days when the sky is crystal-clear and the air is chilly...
Considering the thermostat topped 104°F here in St. Louis today, I probably should have entitled this post, "Top 10 (Dog Days of) Summer Cookies"! Even when it gets this hot outside...
The inspiration to make cookies can strike anywhere, at any moment. At the beginning of January, I went skiing with my family and friends. Both of our families have kids who are now young adults and fast skiers...
November has finally come! The days are shorter, and sometimes cloudy, and the air is colder . . . but the trees put themselves to bed for the long sleep of winter, delighting us with their gorgeous, vibrant leaves.
As I said on our Contributors page, it takes a small community to keep a large community like Cookie Connection going . . . but what I really should have said is: it takes a small (and ever-growing) community of passionate, talented, and tireless volunteers to keep it going!
I’ve found a new love! Wafer paper. I played around with it a bit on my Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #5 cookie set and then again on my Day of the Dead cookie. Since I got some questions about how I made these floral accents, I...
Couldn't make it to CookieCon this year? I know, I know, I too would have been sorely disappointed if in the same boat . . . But chin up! There's no reason to cry over dropped cookies (cookier-speak for "spilled milk")! I've got something...
Yes, after a long hiatus, I'm finally back with another Cookier Close-up, and I couldn't be more thrilled to get to know our September 2023 site artist a whole lot better...
My son is getting ready to head off to his freshman year of college, and our talks lately have centered around his future life of independence. The other day, he sat at the kitchen counter daydreaming aloud about...
Judging by the number of entries we had for this Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge, I would say that many of you spent more time in your kitchens than at the beach this summer! We had a whopping 55 (!!!!) entries for this challenge...
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...
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...
When my kids were little, they loved advent calendars, especially ones with hidden chocolates. They’d start hounding me to buy them in the beginning of October, long before I wanted to think about the winter holiday frenzy. I assumed it was the (subpar) chocolate that appealed to them. But...
Hi, everyone! I’m back with our second (and last) installment of Cookier Close-ups featuring our 2017 Cookiers’ Choice Awards winners. A couple of months ago, we spoke with Cookiers of the Year Ginny and Doug Levack of Creative Cookier (here), and now we’re chatting with none other than swissophie (aka Sonja Galmad), our 2017 Cookie Artist of the Year...
Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la la la la! 'Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la la la la! Okay, okay, so it's not yet Halloween in your neck of the woods, but it's already Christmas in stencil-designing land...
This Toolbox Talk tackles an ingredient that is so fundamental to rolled cookie recipes that maybe it should have been the first in this series. I'm talking about flour, people! Even an ingredient as common as flour has its differences around the world, which impact baking results...
Hi, folks! Apologies in advance for my brevity this week, but it's been a working holiday of sorts for me. When not enjoying my home-away-from-home here in Maine, I've been combing through 15 years' worth of belongings...
As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of the next, I find myself reflecting on what has happened in my life over the last year, and trying to figure out what went well, what went less well, and what I can do to improve in the new year...
As much as I love Christmas – the time spent with family and friends, all those smells, and, yes, even "Last Christmas" by Wham! – there is always the thing about the presents...
Hi, everyone! As Bakerloo Station mentioned in today's Practice Bakes Perfect challenge recap, we unfortunately had to delete an entry from the challenge due to lack of compliance with our "no copying copyrighted work without permission rule" (which mirrors US copyright law)...
I love summer. And I love flowers too. One of my all-time favourite flowers is the daisy. We call them margaritas in Argentina. (Yes! Exactly like that refreshing drink.) Daisies have been adopted as a symbol of...
What do these cookies have in common? I made all of these sets last fall, while I was doing another great cookie challenge, one hosted by the wonderful LilaLoa . All of these cookies were made with the same set of icing, with...
It's never too early to start planning for Christmas, especially when that planning involves a challenge with over $700 worth of prizes! (Yes, over $700. You heard me right!) Thanks to the very generous support of several sponsors (see below),...
It's one of those weeks where mysterious unknown outside forces are causing lots of previously posted cookies to trend again. This phenomenon usually happens around...
I love the stretch between Christmas and New Year's Day. It's a time when it seems as though the holiday pressure has receded but the celebratory atmosphere remains. At my house...
We are in full Thanksgiving mode at my house. There will only be a small gathering this year but I am still pulling out all the stops. The bird, the sides, and, of course, all of the sweets! I like to do...
I am celebrating winter with a 3-D winter wonderland tree cookie, and I hope you'll come celebrate with me! This 3-D project doesn’t require any icing "glue" to stand, so it's more like a 3-D cookie platter. The concept behind its construction is similar to that of mug-hugger cookies, which are . . .
My mother recently installed some lattices on her terrace and, with that image in mind, I immediately envisioned a Mother’s Day cookie project: a lattice cookie decorated with royal icing flower transfers. The transfers for this project are a...
This month's tutorial is all about royal icing transfers, which are decorations piped on parchment paper or acetate and then attached to cookies once they are dry . . . but we are not using cookies! Although I like the idea of decorated cookies as place cards, I like less the idea of...
Thank you all for participating in the first-ever survey of Sugar Dot Surveys! I wanted to find out what (if anything) you use to speed-dry your icing, and how you use those tools and why. You sure did come through. Those who participated range from...
Ho, ho, ho! How are everyone's holidays going?! I must say I am busy and joyful. Although, honestly, right now, I am mostly very busy, and waiting for a little downtime for more of the joyful to kick in. Which, brings me to my first point...
I've got another cookie platter! Why?! Just because I like to design them, especially when they can be customized to the season, holiday, or occasion! I also like stenciled effects...
In real life, my tastes verge on plain. I’m a no makeup, jeans-and-t-shirt sort of girl. Naturally, my wedding ring is a simple gold band, and that’s exactly how I like it. Despite these tendencies...
While this Easter cookie box may look complex, it is actually quite easy to decorate and assemble, and a very manageable project for beginners. Imagine each side built as a fence with two vertical planks nailed onto two parallel horizontal planks. In this case...
I have a thing for benches. I especially like those in parks in spring and fall, and those along rivers. The idea for this project developed around this white little bench...
My dear friend Raquel knows me very well. She knows I absolutely love cute little things - charming, but casual at the same time...
Everything's coming up roses! (Unless, of course, you live in the Midwest, or Northeast, or frankly anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in which case, there is nothing coming up, and there is snow on the ground. But I digress)...
They're breeding like rabbits - the Easter cookies on this site, that is! And the rabbit theme is even more prolific! (Only one of this week's top ten Easter cookies doesn't have one, or a part of one.) Turns out, bunnies can be cute as...
Well, in case you hadn't noticed, it's 2015, and that means I've almost completed a year's worth of these tutorials! So to celebrate, I'm going to do things a little differently today. You might notice there aren't many photos . . . that's...
It's funny how there often seems to be a space for a little honeybee or two on my cookies, and on occasion I've made a honeycomb for them to sit on. In this two-part tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a honeycomb cookie...
[EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm thrilled to announce the addition of another top-flight decorator to our team of contributors - the fabulously talented Lucy Samuels of UK-based Honeycat Cookies . Every other month, Lucy will be pushing your (and possibly her!) creative boundaries with an innovative cookie design and technique tutorial. For her debut post below, she explores an interesting twist on the wet-on-wet technique, which, as you'll soon see, is a great way to get some relief (so to speak)...
The other day I came across Craftsy’s gelatin bubble tutorial by Erin Gardner. The tutorial details a really simple technique using small balloons and gelatin to create whimsical bubbles to decorate a cake. It seemed like an easy jump to go from...
Oftentimes, working through the process of one cookie project will spur an idea for another. Last month when I was gluing loads of little pieces of wafer paper to my vulture, it inspired another project in which I could...
The stretch between the middle of spring and the beginning of summer feels like a continuous celebration. Birthdays! Father's Day! Graduations! I've mentioned this before but...
When my kids were little, every Halloween we would make ghost decorations from cheesecloth and laundry starch. The process was simple: soak cheesecloth in the starchy liquid, drape it over a rough form of compacted aluminum foil, and allow it to dry. The gauzy cheesecloth would harden, creating spooky, semi-transparent specters. In this project, naturally-starchy rice paper stands in for cheesecloth to make an edible version of this Halloween craft.
Hello and welcome to the recap of Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #50! I must admit that this challenge was by far one of my favorites, as it gave everyone a chance to...
One of the amazing things about Cookie Connection is that you can find quite literally tens of thousands of cookie clips from which to draw inspiration or learn new techniques. Clips are...
If you can remember as far back as July (my bad for getting behind on these Close-ups), the wonderful Cookies Fantastique, aka Carol Mattison, was our featured site artist, wowing us with a rather spectacular Fourth of July set! In her site artist forum intro published around that time, Carol mentioned that...
I knew the year 2020 would be one of change and challenge for me personally, but I think I speak for all of us when I say that no one could have predicted where we all would be just three months into the new year. Y'all, I can't deny that my heart is heavy...
