Christmas Cookies: Redux

As promised more Christmas Cookies!

Here are the Brown Sugar Spice cookies all dressed up as Christmas Trees. I did a few different decorations, but these turned out the best (though next time I will leave off the yellow and gold blob "star"). I love how with every cookie (or cake or pie) I make and decorate I get better at decorating and flavor combinations. Though I hate that after a batch is done and the lessons are learned I have to make another batch to see the results!

I used olive green royal icing and different sprinkles and sugars to decorate. As of now I do not use an outlining and a flooding consistency with my royal icing. I use a multi-purpose thickness that holds a shape enough to outline and is fluid enough to fill in as well, I read about this technique on www.sweetsugarbelle.com, this woman knows her cookies and calls this 20-second royal icing. This method speeds up the process and is allowing me to practice different decorating techniques. In time I plan to switch to the more traditional of outlining and flooding for most of my cookies.

It must also be said that some of my cookie recipes are based on Sweetsugarbelle's recipes as well. I often get lost on her site. :)

Without further ado Spiced Brown Sugar Christmas Tree Cookies

I also have some of the Lemon Cookies in the process of decorating. "Posed" pictures coming soon.

Christmas Cookies

I grew up loving sugar cookies. Christmas (or any holiday or family get together) meant sugar cookies with royal icing, made by my great grandma Ruth. She didn't do anything overly decorative or fancy, just dipped the tops of the cookies in a bowl of frosting close to flooding consistency (probably looser). Then if she felt like it each cookie would get a sprinkle of random non-pareils like these. I loved these cookies, in shapes of chickens, rabbits, hearts and other random, never holiday specific shapes. 


This year instead of making gingerbread cookies I decided to make sugar cookies. I made vanilla bean, brown sugar spice, chocolate chip, almond, and chocolate sugar cookies. They all received glowing reviews! I plan to tweak the recipes a bit and then they will be added to baked by Deese's list of available baked goods. I sadly forgot to take pictures of the brown sugar spice and chocolate chip cookies, but I did get pictures of the vanilla bean, almond, and chocolate.


I used royal icing colored using Americolor gels and jimmies, pearls, course sugar, and sanding sugar decorate.


The following pictures were snapped using my cell phone, they are apologetically terrible. I will be be making more cookies soon and will be sure to photograph them like supermodels!


Christmas Cookies 2011

Chocolate Poinsettias and Snowflakes and Almond Wreaths

Vanilla Bean Wreaths 

I am making more cookies this week, sadly still Christmas in nature (late presents), I will post the pictures when I get them done!

welcome to baked by Deese

Hello! Here you will find pictures and tidbits about things I bake. This blog will also serve as a home base for my baking business. It is my goal to have my baked goods in a shop by Spring of 2012. Currently my target will be coffee shops, and possibly non-food shops like antique stores.

The baked goods I am focusing on are cupcakes, cookies, and pies. I hope to sell them as individually wrapped items, the pies by the slice of course. For the next few months I will be perfecting my recipes, and researching green packaging ideas. Then its on to getting  my product out there. Dropping off boxes of goodies with contact info and pricing. Then there will be a lot of finger crossing and waiting for the phone to ring.