Blog: Trending Over Last 24 Hours

Whether for a belated Valentine's Day celebration or any other day of the year, my February 2022 Dynamic Duos™ release is the perfect way to tell your loved one (or secret crush) that you care! With charming clover and bee background designs and messages such as...

Hi, all! I'm here to talk about a recent change to our site's Terms of Use that is related to cookies. No, I'm not talking about the type of cookies that we all know and love so well. I'm talking about the cookies that are...

Fall and its vibrant colors are a joy for the heart and a great source of inspiration to me. Mums, pumpkins, and wagons surely have been my favorite things to “cookie” in past years...

A wafer paper flower placed on a cookie spread with royal icing makes a charming and simple beginner cookie project. In fact, that's exactly what I made a few years ago, using a wafer paper sunflower, when I was still struggling to...

A couple of months ago, I re-posted my “old” Easter Cookie Box, a tutorial I wrote two years ago. The idea was that the sides of the box would look like a fence that had its vertical planks replaced with Easter cookies. I was surprised to see how much love this box has still...

Hi, everyone! This month, we’ll be getting to know our May 2020 featured site artist Icingsugarkeks, aka Gabi, a whole lot better! Hurrah! Gabi also happened to be the brainchild and graphic designer behind our current June site art. Gabi would prefer...

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...

Happy holidays! I hope everyone has been having a festive, or even restful, couple of weeks. And if you've had more than your fill of quality time with aunts, uncles, and cousins, just sneak away to...

Most of my cookie projects are inspired by my memories, and so is this one, inspired as it is by some beach huts I saw in La Mer, Dubai (UAE), a beachfront with restaurants, shops, activities for children, and more. It was...

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...

Greetings from Chiberia! In case you are wondering what Chiberia looks like, it pretty much looks like...

Years ago, I received two mini hot water bottles from my sister. They had plain knitted covers. One of them was red with a white heart on the front, and the other had the same knitted cover with the colors inverted. (They were too cute together for my sister to buy only one of them!) This memory...

I like sunflowers. I remember, as a little kid, asking my parents to "kidnap" a huge sunflower that I had seen for a while towering strong, wild, and lonely along a road near a sunflower field. They finally said "yes", so we transplanted the sunflower in a large vase to our terrace, and I took care of it...

This project is halfway between a cookie platter and a 3-D cookie project. It is once again intended to be a treat to share with friends, with the 3-D mug offering a new and different way to arrange and serve cookies...

The recent Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #21 about lace was the source of my inspiration for this project. Each challenge is a wonderful experience because it focuses participants...

Roses, roses, EVERYWHERE! I don't think I have been surrounded by this many roses since my wedding. In 1993. Seriously, people! You shattered the Practice Bakes Perfect participation record, with a whopping 76 entries for Challenge #16!

This post is all about my introduction to meringue powder, one of the subjects that initially spurred the idea for this Toolbox Talk column. Questions about meringue powder come up regularly on Cookie Connection, as there seem to be many differences between brands...

Cream of tartar is one of the more mysterious yet most common ingredients in baking. It can also be one of the more elusive ones to find in some countries!

Cold weather got you down? Well, I'm about to warm you up with a wonderfully cheerful giveaway brought to you by the talented illustrator Claudine Hellmuth !* Thank you, Claudine!   If you haven't yet had the pleasure of "meeting" Claudine's...

Hello! It's time once again to reveal this week's finalists in our Christmas Countdown Challenge. Reminder: This is no inconsequential contest - $700 in prizes are at stake! Thank you again to our sponsors Designer Stencils, Fancy Flours,...

My word, putting together my new cookie decorating app has been like birthing a baby! But it's finally done and ready to push out into the world (so to speak)!   Celebration GiveawayTo help spread the word about its birth, I'm running a...

I believe I implied in my last Saturday Spotlight that I had my act together for the new year. Well, that early assessment has proven not to be so...

One of the many amazing aspects of Cookie-A-Thon, organized by the wonderful Nancy Westfall, is that sponsors like me get free All-Access Passes to give away. Remember, Cookie-A-Thon (a four-day spree of online cookie decorating classes from November 2 to November 5) is normally free. However, if you want..

In my neck of the woods, spring has sprung. The gardens are an avalanche of color and texture. Not only are the flower beds overflowing, but so are the calendars. There is...

What a week it has been! There was a Flower Moon, Cinco de Mayo, and the coronation. Not to mention birthdays, graduations, and nuptials. And absolutely let's not forget...

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...

This is the story of a cookie tutorial that was meant to be a 3-D pumpkin cookie project but ended up becoming a dimensional cookie composition that resembles a pumpkin. Three years ago I shared a tutorial featuring royal icing place cards. They were royal icing plaque transfers decorated with three different kinds of...

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...

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.

This month, we reunite with Ryoko Hayashi (aka Ryoko ~Cookie Ave.), our March 2022 site artist and longtime contributor to Cookie Connection and our Practice Bakes Perfect challenges. Ryoko, who hails from Fukuoka, Japan, joined Cookie Connection in June 2015 and, since then, has...

It's wedding season here on Cookie Connection, and our challenge entrants have been busy planning, decorating, and packaging the perfect cookie favors to help commemorate our fictitious customer's special day...

With Mothers' Day just around the corner here in the US, it seems only fitting to highlight the top-trenders in this clip category tonight! And because we all know moms everywhere...

When I was a small child, we had a family friend who was very old and well-travelled. I loved to visit her house because she kept a display of souvenirs from the various countries she’d visited. There were...

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...

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...

Hi, all. In an effort to keep you on your toes, I am once again changing up this week's Saturday Spotlight to focus on another less oft-visited area of the site. Last week, it was the blog, and, this week, it is the...

This cookie swing project has been sitting in my mind for a long time, mostly because I was looking for a way to make it completely food-safe, if not edible. I imagined it as a centerpiece or a cake topper. But I couldn't come up with an easy way to make an edible crossbar and swing chains, so I ultimately resorted to...

I’ve always had a love of blue and white china. The patterns are classically beautiful but with a striking contrast that makes me want to look closer. Recently, I came across this blue and white dinner plate. With its large-scale flowers, it felt like a...

I'm back! I returned early this week from summertime temperatures in Jamaica, Cozumel, and Grand Cayman (on Creative Cookiers' recent cookie cruise) to truly fall-like weather here in Missouri! Today, I had to...

Vacation is wonderful in so many respects, isn't it? My one last week to the Amalfi Coast not only gave me the opportunity to spend time with my niece and to explore a new place, but it also gave me a newfound appreciation for the stunning work that you all routinely do...

The summer of 1989 was one of my favorites. I spent my days with friends by the pool and my nights camping in the backyard. We watched scary movies, giggled about boys, and crimped each others’ hair. And all the while...

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...

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...

I love to take inspiration for my cookie designs from nature. There’s an imperfect quality to organic objects that I find very forgiving; things don’t have to be perfectly straight, smooth, or symmetrical. So I try to...

With one of the year's biggest cookie holidays barely behind us, it's already time to get the creative juices flowing for the next big one - Valentine's Day! Phew! The work of the cookier is never done...

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...

This year's 3-D Christmas tree cookie was inspired by a project that my kids made in elementary school: a Christmas tree composed of stacked cardboard tubes (like those inside rolls of paper towels), all stapled together. Here, I made thick cookie rings and baked them close together so they would fuse into a sturdy structure. I then...