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...
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...
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...
My mini-vacay in the Big Apple last weekend was just what I needed to recharge. Escaping the treadmill of daily life (and the confines of my basement work kitchen!) opened me up to sights and sounds I hadn't experienced in quite a while...
Hi, everyone! Thanks so much for the brief reprieve from the Spotlight over the last two weekends. Having a week off did me a world of good! I can finally think clearly enough to resume my cookie work! I sincerely hope you...
By the time you all read this, I will hopefully be lying on a beach, cerveza in hand, but at this moment, as I write this Spotlight, I can see and think of nothing but lace! As ever, I am extremely impressed...
[EDITOR'S NOTE: It is with hugely mixed feelings that I announce that this post will be the last in our beloved Dear Yankee Girl series. I'm sad, because Kari is just about the best tutorial writer I could have ever imagined, so she will be greatly missed! (A gross understatement.) But I am happy, because Kari wanted to clear the decks to pursue some new and different things - which, knowing Kari, can only be great stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing where she takes her cookie...
I had always intended to do a tutorial on my Halloween spiders for you all, but I just didn't fancy repeating the same cookies. So I set to thinking how I could change things a bit, and do something different. Well, for a start, I wanted to have a bit...
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...
At long last, we’re picking up where we left off in our June 27 (!) chat with Cookie Connection challenge host Sweet Prodigy, aka Christine Dutcher! In addition to organizing and recapping our bimonthly Practice Bakes Perfect challenges, Christine is a precision-piper extraordinaire, best known for her...
I don't know about you, but I've been fantasizing about all the places I'd rather be than cooped up in my house under quarantine! What I would give for a return cookie class in the Dominican Republic, where I was...
Three-dimensional (3-D) cookie projects are my favorite, but they need to be broken in pieces in order to eat the cookies, and very often I hear "they are too nice to be broken" on top of the usual "they are too nice to be eaten"...
Spring is in the air! Can you feel it? Flowers and trees are coming to life again, and everywhere you look the colors are changing from brown to bright green...
Hello, my name is Violet, and I love making needlepoint (aka cross stitch) pattern cookies. What you are looking at here is a large (8-inch) heart cookie decorated with a needlepoint rose pattern - my first cookie of this magnitude...
Hi, all! Usually I put admin posts like this in the forums, but to ensure that this post gets maximum visibility, I'm putting it front and center on the blog! As you may know, we had a large site upgrade last week, dubbed "The Recipe Release" by my site guys at Hoop.la...
Welcome to our Practice Bakes Perfect Challenge #15 Recap. Spring has finally sprung! Hopefully, you are recovered from both your Easter baking and spring-breaking, and are ready for a whirlwind tour of the amazing Instanbul-inspired cookies that I am about to present to you.
This Saturday Spotlight may be late, but it's super sweet! Yes, it's the long-awaited announcement of the 2015 Cookiers' Choice Awards winners!
My first days of school seem like only yesterday. Every August of my childhood as I was about to begin my next year of primary school, it was always the same story: like clockwork, my mum would take me to shop for new dresses...
Well, well, the nominations for the 2014 Cookiers' Choice Awards are all in, and they have finally been tallied! But before I spill the beans, thank you to those who cast votes in celebration of the accomplishments of their fellow cookiers. It's...
At long last, we’re catching up in depth with our wonderful July 2023 site artist Lori Todhunter, aka Cookies on Cambridge. (Aside: I always love finding out the real names behind cookies names, don’t you?! They seem so much more personal to me.) As we learned in...
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..
Hi, all! I hope you're still enjoying your Christmas holiday (if you celebrate), just as I am doing here. After a flurry of work to prep my house for the occasion...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Fall, autumn, autunno . . . whatever you call it, it's one of my favourite seasons. I designed this project at the end of August, so to get the feeling of autumn, I looked at some old pictures of my yard in Italy. I love the...
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...
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas here on Cookie Connection! While most people ramp up for the Christmas season after Thanksgiving, we cookiers have to start planning our cookie sets well in advance of the holiday rush...
I have a cookier confession to make . . . I own not a single food mold. Not a one. And so, it should come as a surprise to no one, that I have also never made a molded cookie...
I have wanted to do a collaboration challenge for a long time. As a musician, and trial lawyer, and now cookier, I truly believe that collaboration brings out the best of each of our individual talents...
While there were still a few Christmas hold-outs topping this week's hot list*, like the lovely spruce sprig pictured above by Honeycat Cookies, it seems like the vast majority of you have promptly changed color palettes and moved from evergreens and snow onto hearts and roses.
Just mention the word "marketing" to a cookie maker, and she'll most likely want to run and hide under a blankie. We all know marketing is really important, and we know we need to do it, but we don't entirely understand what it is or...
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!...
Today I would like to share with you my thoughts on leasing versus buying commercial property and the reasons behind why I chose to lease preexisting commercial space. I am not sure if it is simply a matter of preference to lease or buy...
Now that we’ve got the business plan out of the way, let’s move on to why I made the decision to open a storefront. You might be wondering why I would make such a decision when my state already has a cottage food law in place....
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...
Even though some people may think of beadwork (the making of perfectly round icing dots) as a minor icing detail, I like to think of it as a full-fledged decorating technique. Why the extra attention? Well, partly because I love dots and I use them a...
To my surprise, rice paper has become one of my favorite elements to incorporate into new designs. It’s such a versatile material. Rice paper can be molded (to create a balloon), imprinted (with the veining of a bumblebee wing), or kept flat (like the windows of a tiny cabin). It can be...
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...
Hi, everyone! This week, we’re hearing from Stacy Frank, aka The Frostitute and two-time winner of my 3-D competition category, about her cookie journey and why she thinks...
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...
The idea for this project was sparked by an ad on Instagram promoting stamps to make real wax seals. I initially wanted to make an entire wax seal cookie, but I instead ended up using royal icing to make seal transfers to go on larger envelope cookies. For the envelope design, I...
It's "cookie kryptonite" time again here in Practice Bakes Perfect land! Since it is either spring or fall for you, depending on your hemisphere, now is the perfect time to wrestle with the ever-changing temperature and humidity conditions that play such a critical role in executing wet-on-wet cookie designs...
Even though we're in the midst of the last lazy days of summer, when most of the rest of the world is lollygagging on beaches or in parks, you folks never cease to amaze me...
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...
Summertime is wedding time! I am simply ignoring the fact that it is not summer, but has recently snowed here, and that I don’t know anyone who’s getting married this year...
The Toolbox Talk series will be a place where different strands of frustration, research, and suggestion come together like colourful yarn, hooked, woven, and sewn into an ever-growing blanket of comfort and understanding!...
***** THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED ***** Hey, all! Cookie Connection is partnering with Zazzle this week on a terrific giveaway surrounding their blow-out Christmas in July sale that's running from today, July 21, through July 25, 2014. ...
Hi, everyone! Once again, I am taking over the Saturday Spotlight this weekend with the recap of Watch-Learn-Create Challenge #52. It featured guest Evelin Milanesi, also known as Evelindecora, and her signature Piped Crochet Technique developed in 2016...
