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As a cookier who is somewhat partial to royal icing stringwork, I must admit that I was really looking forward to seeing what type of designs our Cookie Connection members would come up with for Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #44. And after seeing all of the entries, I have to say that I was...

Spring is quickly approaching, so here’s a 3-D flower cookie to get you in the mood! It's decorated using the felt technique, because it's February and still cold, and because this technique is...

This month's project tutorial features a 3-D driftwood tree cookie, intended to be a table display for an occasion at home. If you plan to transport it, I recommend...

Another Cookier Close-up! Woo hoo! Sorry for the brief hiatus, but I had a super busy December with virtual classes and events, and it took me a little while to re-group after all of that! Anywho, I’m back, and I’m sure you’re going to love reading this up-close-and-personal interview as much as I loved conducting it. It’s with...

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...

Hello, and Happy New Year! I am sure that by now most of us are more than happy to say goodbye to 2020 and welcome in 2021. The past year may have been challenging, but we did our best to...

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...

Well, Christmas is clearly here! And I couldn't be more eager to usher in the holiday season after this crazy year we've had. Apart from one cookie on this week's hot list*, all of this week's fabulous creations are suitable decking-the-halls material. With everything from...

There's no ignoring the fact that 2020 has been a year like no other. It was the year that we went from living life outside of our homes to living life within our homes. Home became the place where we were...

It’s been a particularly brutal summer here in California. Between the extended record-breaking heat waves and the raging wildfires, I’ve never been more excited for autumn. After weeks of...

So, everyone, there was another unannounced site update today, which changed a few things that only impact me. However, it changed one thing that impacts all of us greatly...

This tutorial combines two of my favorite things: miniatures and Halloween. The result is a spooky play on my previous miniature projects, Breakfast in Bed for Mom and Dad’s Breakfast. Complete with...

This "Welcome Back" cookie by Ryoko ~Cookie Ave. is an apt cover image considering it's been a couple of weeks since I wrote a Spotlight! It's not only apropos, it's also impossibly cute! What a...

Summer may be coming to a close, but it continues to live on through the stunning array of floral masterpieces submitted for this challenge. From the traditional to the unexpected, our entries showed that...

I'm back after a week off, and what a refreshing sight it is to see the marvelous cookies that made it onto our hot list tonight. Some have been dancing around the top ten photo feed for several days due to their ongoing popularity, while others are...

A felt letter board is the inspiration for this short and easy tutorial. From humble beginnings as vintage signs, letter boards with quotes have become very popular elements of...

At the start of this challenge, I asked you to take the traditional technique of brush embroidery and turn it into something completely new and unexpected. Admittedly, I wasn't sure how much could be done beyond the traditional ruffles, flowers, and beach scenes that we commonly see, but you...

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...

Hey, all! I hope everyone is hanging in there and staying healthy through these very difficult times. For this Spotlight, I'm going to once again highlight an underutilized, but richly informative area of the site: our videos! Since many of us are...

As tough as the coronavirus has been, there have been some silver linings to being home with more than the usual time on my hands! One of the biggest pluses has been...

Hello, everyone! I am so excited and very honored to be taking over the challenges from the amazing Bakerloo Station. Thank you, Christine, for creating so many wonderful challenges over the years. I think we can all agree that they have helped us to grow to become better cookiers all around...

As you may know from my recent forum post , I was as surprised as you all by yesterday's site upgrade. (Somehow the advance notices about it never made it to my inbox, or I would have warned you.) Anywho . . . since the upgrade, I've been running around, testing the various changes and figuring out which ones most impact you, so I could give you this update. In short, lots of small (and a few big) things changed, but essentially only two changes really impact you. They are: 1. Reactions...

Easter has been one of my favorite holidays since I was a child. I remember how my sisters and I would spend hours drawing designs on cooked eggs with crayons before carefully dipping them into little cups of dye. Once we had amassed dozens of brightly colored eggs, the treasure hunts would begin. We’d...

Continuing in my tradition of years past, I am about to share, all in one place, ALL of the CookieCon 2020 Sugar Show winners! How fab is that?! First, a huge thanks to Karen and Mike Summers, CookieCon founders and organizers extraordinaire, for helping to make this post happen. Each year, like clockwork, while they're still reeling in the aftermath of the show, they...

My husband and I planted nearly 400 tulip and daffodil bulbs last fall, and, with temperatures in the fifties for the last few days, the first of them are beginning to emerge! (Proof below.) I'm so excited for spring to arrive, I could almost sing about it! On second thought...

Wow, what fickle people we cookiers are! A couple of days ago, even before Valentine's Day had passed, chicks and spring flowers were beginning to lure us away from hearts, Cupids, and other love-themed sets. Or maybe it was just the sudden cold snap that turned us on to warmer, springier motifs? (It was 6°F here yesterday! Yikes!)...

Here I am slugging it out, prepping cookies for my next video shoot and wondering if I'll have enough new material to fill two days of shooting time. And here you are...

Happy New Year! Perhaps (wink, wink), your New Year's resolutions include improving your cookie game by entering more Practice Bakes Perfect Challenges in 2020. In fact, on the Cookie Connection calendar, I believe 2020 is the Year of the Healthy Risk!...

Boo! Did I scare you? Maybe a little bit? . . . No? Well, I could tell by the entries we received this time around that you guys were not scared off by this admittedly difficult and technical challenge, but bravely tackled it head on. In fact...

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...

This is not my first project with cookie spools. The first one, back in 2017, was my entry for Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #21 (the bimonthly challenge series organized by Bakerloo Station here on Cookie Connection). On that occasion, I learned to...

Happy weekend, everyone! My apologies in advance for being terse, but it's been a whirlwind couple of weeks, and I'm exhausted. When my 3-D competition filming wrapped on July 14, I had one day to pack my bags and hit the road again. Since then, I've been to...

I know, I know, it's a bit early for Halloween, but if we can have "Christmas in July" sales, TV shows, and all sorts of other promos, what's keeping us from doing "Halloween in July"?! Well . . . nothing's stopping me...

Unbelievable. That is the only word to describe the entries we received for Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #34 - Inside the Box. Cookie creations that are 3-D take an extra level of planning, an extra level of skill, an extra level of patience, and, yes, an extra level of luck to pull off. Despite...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In the last few years that I lived in Italy, tiny wooden boxes of strawberries made their appearance in the grocery store by the middle of February. They were imported, as it was too early for strawberries in Italy. They were so colorful and so neatly arranged in their wooden boxes...

When I used to sell my cookies, practicality was my worst enemy. It was an infuriating little voice in my head whispering sad truths: “too fragile”, “ too big”, “too sticky”. Every design had to live in a little bag without risk of breaking, smudging, or becoming stale on its path to the customer’s event. Now...

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...

I’m back with our second-to-last Close-up with CookieCon 2018 instructors. (I know, it’s hard to believe, but by January, I’ll be moving on to the 2019 instructors!) Here, we’re catching up in more detail with Andrea Walters of Andy Kay’s Cookies, with whom we first chatted back on October 6, here. We learned then that...

As I am nearly on my way out the door for a week of vacation, I decided to bring you this week's Spotlight a day early! And, as turkey day is nearly upon us all (here in the US, that is), there's no more fitting subject matter for this Spotlight than Thanksgiving...

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...

When I first posted this "Crystal Clear" challenge, I knew that it would be a doozy. Believe me, I know that sugar and isomalt are not the easiest materials to work with and that mastery of these materials requires practice, practice, practice. But I also know...

Woo hoo! I've got a special Spotlight for you today - a recap of the CookieCon 2018 Sugar Show, which concluded with much fanfare only a couple of days ago! As you may or may not know, CookieCon is the largest cookie-only convention in the United States...

I bet you're thinking, "EEK! How is it possible we're already talking about Halloween cookies?! Wasn't it just January?!" Yes, fall cookie deadlines are definitely creeping up on us, but please put aside any fear...