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...
When it comes to creating cookie designs, I find Father’s Day to be one of the most difficult holidays. Every year I look for inspiration, but I seem to find only a handful of ideas, none of which apply to the man I’m trying to celebrate...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I love the idea of stained glass cookies; the shine and transparency are so striking and delicate. I’m not too crazy about any of the mediums I’ve used for the effect, however. I tried...
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...
My first child is packing for college as we speak. Her once overcrowded room is looking practically stark as more and more boxes accumulate in the hall. These visual reminders of her departure have me thinking excitedly about where this new journey will take her...
Ah, summer. When my kids were in grade school, those first few weeks of summer vacation were like paradise. Sleeping in, staying up late, slumber parties, and lazy days - summer was everything they thought they wanted. As the days passed, however, they’d always reach a point when...
I’m really terrible at piping people. I give them a try every once in a while when I’m inspired by some tutorial or image, but my people never look right. Their eyes might be uneven, their noses too large, or their hands so full of fingers that they look...
In real life, my tastes verge on plain. I’m a no makeup, jeans-and-t-shirt sort of girl. Naturally, my wedding ring is a simple gold band, and that’s exactly how I like it. Despite these tendencies...
When I was a little girl, every morning my sister and I would hop into my mother’s bed. We would sit there beneath her cozy comforter and eagerly wait for her to return. After what felt like an interminable amount of time...
