Whether you attended CookieCon this year or simply read about the happenings here on Cookie Connection, cookiers near and far have gone through some form of withdrawal since its ending! This month, I hope to ease the withdrawal symptoms...
I would like to start by saying thank you. I was nervous about my first post, but you guys gave it an overwhelmingly positive response. For that, I thank you. And because of that overwhelmingly positive response, I wrote up a tutorial to answer the...
Fellow cookiepreneurs, the holidays are upon us, and I hope this month’s post finds you in high spirits and looking forward to the coming days. Before I begin, I wanted to share that I recently received feedback that some of you would be...
I don’t know about you, but I have faced many challenges in my lifetime, the biggest of which knocked me down so hard I thought I would never survive. Oddly enough, it was through that challenge that I found my true calling and built a small...
We did it again! Thanks to several amazing sponsors, prizes for the 2023 return-to-in-person edition of Julia M. Usher’s Cookie Art Competition™ are as impressive as ever. In record-breaking time (about half the usual), our sponsors...
My first daffodils are up here in Missouri – a telltale sign that I not only need to rake up the residual fall leaves 😊, but I also need to get cranking on prep for the onslaught of spring events that starts at the end of March and continues without break through mid-May. Today I took these cheery harbingers of spring seriously and...
Hi, all! I just returned from a brief trip and am gearing up for a busy work week ahead, so I'll keep this post short and sweet. As you probably suspected, we've got a...
Hi, everyone! For this challenge, I have a special guest, someone you know very well. She comes from Italy, and she has been one of the most active members of Cookie Connection for years...
First, thanks to everyone who watched judge Laura Saporiti and me live on Facebook on July 25! You all had some great questions about my cookie art competition. If you missed the live, don't fret! You can . . .
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...
These delicate floral Easter cookies were inspired by a lovely (free!) vintage graphic from an old greeting card. The image depicts a cluster of daisies forming an egg shape, framed by a spray of dark greenery. I was immediately...
Hi, everyone! If you've read the most recent Practice Bakes Perfect challenge recap, you know that our beloved host Sweet Prodigy has decided to move on to bigger and better things. While I couldn't be more delighted about the work Christine (Dutcher) has done to develop and support these challenges over the last two years, I am just as...
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...
On this eve of Independence Day, it's only fitting that this week's top-trending cookie (and also our cover image) is a tribute to the beauty of the United States. Kudos to Zeena for the very clever concept of...
After last week's polar vortex fiasco, I'm hopping as fast as I can into spring - and so is this month's Dynamic Duos™ design! The design, called "Hopping Into Spring" (of course, what else?!), is more...
This month's release is called "Chinese New Year," but I consider it more of an East-meets-West way of ushering in 2021. While its background of plum blossoms and auspicious messages of "Love", "Luck", "Hope", and "Peace" are...
As a cookier who has spent hundreds of hours piping thousands of lines, it was only inevitable that a Practice Bakes Perfect stringwork challenge would eventually happen. This challenge is all about...
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...
These aren’t the cookies I intended to post. I started weeks earlier with a completely different concept. I was excited about the idea and the progress I was making. However, on the final and most risky step, after investing more hours than I’d care to admit, I decided I...
My mom can grow anything. It wasn’t always so. She started out a city kid from New York with little opportunity or care to nurture a green thumb. But with the 1960s came a newfound desire to commune with nature. My parents moved to a...
My neighbors are expecting their first baby any day now. A little girl! With comically unfortunate timing, our street is being closed for two weeks for repaving. We’ve all had to park our cars a few blocks away on another street or risk being...
Oh my! We went from seasonal ambiguity to full-on Christmas cheer all in one week! Half of the honored cookies on this week's hot list are clearly working double time to get us all in the Christmas spirit, and, I must say, they are succeeding! The other half is...
The chalkboard shelf is a popular item among cookie decorators. It is used to display cookies at farmers' markets, during pop-up sales at home, during birthday parties, and so on. Here are a couple of pictures of a real display shelf with cookies, kindly shared with us by...
I really love these Cookier Close-ups, because they give me an excuse to get to know some very interesting and talented decorators in a way that I probably couldn’t otherwise. (Of course, there’s no rule that says people need to answer my every probing question, but, lucky me, most do!) This month, we’re super fortunate to be joined by...
My husband’s birthday is coming up, and I know exactly what he wants. He’d love for us to take scuba diving lessons together. I can understand the appeal. Who doesn’t enjoy underwater landscapes and interesting sea creatures? There’s only one problem...
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...
I’ve mentioned previously my experiments with stained glass cookies. Cooked sugar was one of the obvious contenders to create the look, but I was hoping to avoid the stark contrast between crunchy, hard sugar and relatively soft cookie. So I set about concocting...
At the start of 2018, I never imagined that the year would be more cookie-rich than 2017 . . . but I somehow managed to trot the globe from Japan to the Dominican Republic; attend a record number of trade shows (which, for me, was four); judge four cookie competitions; keep Cookie Connection going; and launch (and retire . . .) a new airbrush system...
Halloween is my favorite cookie holiday. There are so many fun themes to use; I feel like I’ll never run out of Halloween ideas. Designs can go in a million different directions too...
Because I so much liked using the wet-on-wet technique to make the sunflower in my last tutorial, I decided to use the same technique to make a poppy this month. Poppies are wild; their stalks are irregular; and their petals are always messy. In other words, they're ideal...
As many of you know, I have been hard at work (for over a year!) with my partner Badger Air-Brush Co., a premier US airbrush manufacturer, designing a new high-performance airbrush system for cookie and cake decorating...
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...
Since I spoke so much about pre-CookieCon classes yesterday, I decided to focus today's post on some of the other event kick-off activities happening at CookieCon...
First, my apologies for the delayed Spotlight this week. I wish I could say that all of the prematurely blooming flowers here in St. Louis (daffodils, magnolias, and red buds already!) gave me a bout of spring fever...
After deliberating and deliberating and then deliberating some more, our esteemed panel of judges has finally reached a verdict in our 2016 Cookiers' Choice Awards! Before I reveal the winners, let me just say...
Happy December! The holidays are finally upon us, and pretty soon we will never want to see piping bags filled with red and green icing for as long as we live...
Icing sugar lies at the base of cookie decorating, be it with royal icing or glaze or buttercream. It was through Cookie Connection host Julia Usher’s comments about her teaching experiences in other countries that I realised that icing sugar isn’t the same all over the world...
I love these last lazy days of summer, when we savor every bit of sunlight, wistfully listen to the crickets, and spend as much unconstructed time with family and friends as we can squeeze in...
Hi, all! I'm back with our "usual" Spotlight after a whirlwind week of triaging the vast amount of CookieCon coverage generated by our talented team of correspondents ! Congrats again to Barb Florin, Beverly Parker, Jen Wagman, and...
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...
Well, after months of rain, it's finally kicked into real (sunny) summer weather here in Missouri, and I'm gearing up to enjoy it this weekend with a walk in the park and picnic with hubby. (Our form of date night!) Come to think of it, I'd like to...
It's spring! It's really taken its time, and I'm sorry to those of you who are still feeling chilly (and those who are heading into autumn!), but we've finally had some warm sunny days here and I'm in the mood for blossoms!...
Hello, all! I’m Hallena and this is the Fantastic Bakes and Where to Find Them 's first tutorial. I will be showing you how to create your own Kopykake copycat for a fraction of the price. What is a Kopykake? According to the...
That's right! Burlap is still a hot trend in the home decorating and wedding industries. What we used to call "gunny" back in the day (because gunny sacks were made from this material) has sure come a long way in the last...
It's hard to pinpoint the exact birthday of this (my beloved) site. It launched "softly" into cyberspace in Spring 2013 with different people getting introduced to it at various stages of development. About a month before I announced its birth...
Picture this: Sunlight sneaking past the umbrella over my head, a gentle breeze tempering those rays, a glass-like expanse of water stretching out before me, and a cup of morning (iced) coffee in hand . . . yippee, it's the first weekend of summer -...
This month I have a tutorial for a dimensional cookie platter comprised of two flowers whose petals, centers, and leaves are contoured. When I was thinking about how to decorate the cookies, I decided to...
Happy (almost) end of February everyone! I'm not sure how the weather is where you are but where I am - on the east coast of the United States - things have been all over the place. In a matter of days, we went from...
Hi, all! I'm busy, busy, busy, prepping for a belated Valentine's Day dinner tomorrow with my mom and husband. So while the fixings for beet soup simmer and the red raspberry mousse gels (yes, every menu item is some shade of red or pink!), I'm going to...
Hey, all! With one-and-a-half months to cookie competition time, I took to social media today - live (!) - to answer all of your lingering competition questions, and to hopefully nudge a few more of you off the fence. As I mentioned...
