Okay, so hopefully this departure from my normal Saturday Spotlight will be a fun excursion for everyone, including the cookiers featured here! Seeing as the 2016 Cake Masters Cookie Award finalists (pictured below) were just announced this week, I thought it would be interesting to see how these masterful decorators have evolved over the years. But first, a huge congrats to @Dolce Sentire - Aixa Zunino, @Evelindecora, @SweetAmbs, and @iSugarfy (aka swissophie)!
Ready now for our trip down memory lane? Good, I thought so!
Below you'll see the very first cookie photo that each of these decorators uploaded to Cookie Connection's clips section (with the post date), as well as her most recent upload. Now, granted, each of these decorators posts to Cookie Connection with a different frequency, and some haven't posted all that recently, so this isn't meant to be any kind of comparison - just a glimpse into the various pathways these folks took to becoming great! 
Let's start with Aixa, aka Dolce Sentire, for no particular reason other than her photos sits at the top of the Cake Masters banner!
Vanilla-Chocolate Snowflake Cookies by Dolce Sentire - January 8, 2014
Lady Winter by Dolce Sentire - November 1, 2015 [EDITOR'S NOTE: Of course, Aixa, one of our site contributors, has posted much more recently to the site, but she's been busy posting to our blog, not our clips area. For more recent examples of her glorious work, in the form of her Get Inspired tutorials, visit the blog, here.]
Onto Evelindecora! As a "Cookie Queen in Training" who is rapidly approaching "Cookie Queen" status on this site, Evelin has been posting a lot of great content here, for a very long time . . . here's her debut post . . .
Christmas Cookies with Royal Icing by Evelindecora - December 5, 2013
And here's her most recent post, which earned a top spot in an earlier Saturday Spotlight (for obvious reasons!) . . .
Miniature Food by Evelindecora - September 1, 2016 
Now for the lovely SweetAmbs! Bless her heart . . . Amber joined this site at its inception, because of my insistence 
. I wanted her candid feedback on the site's layout and content, and her help pre-populating the site with photos - and she was most generous! Since then, she's been busy building her massive cookie empire, so her first and last post here were both in 2013. I encourage you to check out her site and YouTube channel to get a more complete picture of the progression of her magnificent work.
Eyelet Lace by SweetAmbs - May 26, 2013
Fourth of July Cookies by SweetAmbs - July 1, 2013
Last but not at all least, swissophie! A relative newcomer to the site (and to cookie decorating in general), Sonja has blown us all away here on Cookie Connection with her incredible knitted and other intricate cookies - so much so that she's kicking off our new "Rising Star" chat series on October 8. (Don't forget to check out her chat room and log your advance questions now!)
Girls' Dresses on Clothes Hangers by swissophie - January 24, 2016
Sonja also posted a video to accompany her most recent photo post below . . . (that video is definitely worth checking out!)
Snowy Owl by swissophie - August 22, 2016
And this completes our little journey to the past and back! Thanks to these wonderful cookiers for so generously sharing their creations over the years - this sharing is what helps us learn and grow, and hopefully evolve into half the decorators that they are!
I'll be resuming my usual format for Saturday Spotlights with my next post, but it won't be until the weekend after next (October 1, to be exact). I'll be taking next week off from the site due to a heavy travel and teaching schedule. 'Til then, live sweetly!
All photos shown here are the courtesy (and copyright) of the designers listed.
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