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...
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...
Do you have some extra time on your hands? Are you a perfectionist with the patience of a saint? Do your friends marvel at your love of tedious projects?...
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...
Growing up, I was fortunate enough to celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah. At our house, Hanukkah was always a quiet affair with an understated elegance. As a child, I would have called it “fancy”. Maybe it was the colors, the deep blues and shiny metallics, that made it feel so sophisticated. Maybe it was...
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...
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 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 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...
A few months ago, I made a water lily pond cookie set inspired by a couple of real ponds that I saw during a trip. One pond had pink flowers, and the other pond had white ones. That set was my...
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...
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 initial idea for this project came while sketching Christmas trees on paper. The triangular shapes soon became a pyramid, which reminded me of the playing card towers I used to build as a child...
My husband served a couple of years in the Navy as a young man, and what remains of that experience is his love for everything maritime and nautical. Our house is littered with little boats, shells, beach pictures, lighthouses, and so on and so forth...
