Funky Cupcake Cookies

A Really Big Cookie

I made this a while back. It's a big sugar cookie that is roughly about 12x7 inches. It was used at a Master's dissertation presentation. The Dissertation was about Antar and Abla. The Footsteps say Antar and Abla in arabic, and the camel is because there is a part of their story where Antar has to go get a special kind of camel from another area to be able to marry his love Abla. I was a little reluctant to freehand such a big element (the camel). I drew it on paper first because my theory is that if I can draw it on paper than I can do it with a piping bag too. I was relieved that it came out ok, and that turned out to be only a minor issue.

The major issue being that, IT CRACKED, like a thousand times! I just stuck it back together with royal icing and moved on because there was no more time to make another one. I barely charged anything for this because of those cracks. My friends who ordered it really didn't mind the cracks that much, so it all worked out in the end. One good thing is that I have learned from my mistakes now. After alot of critical thinking I've figured out a fool proof plan of how to make one of these without the breakage.

Many thanks to my friends the Alzaim's for your support and your business :-)

Theater, Music, and Movies

Birthday cookies for a girl who loves theater, music, and movies.

I'm in love with these pink satin bows, I was smiling the whole time I was tying them.

One special big cookie for the birthday girl


Thanks to Cathy for ordering, it was my pleasure to make these cookies :-)

Graduation cookies

Graduation cookies I made for my brother Safwan's graduation party last sunday. The cake was from Gerardo's Italian Bakery in Westborough, Ma. It was really delicious and not heavy at all.

Girlie Birthday Cookies

These were for my adorable niece Ayah on her 3rd birthday. She picked out her birthday decorations and plates etc. and I made these cookies and cake to match. The colors made me so excited, I love rainbow and neon anything.

Here you can see the plate that I got the designs for the cookies and the cake from.
I'm no cake decorator, but I decided to give it a try and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I made the cake decorations with the same royal icing I use on the cookies. I piped them onto wax paper and the next day right before the party I peeled them off and stuck them on the cake.

It's strawberry cake with a couple extra drops of electric pink gel paste food coloring to make it super pink. I also added in a couple handfuls of rainbow sprinkles to make it a confetti cake. I made chocolate buttercream from scratch for the first time in my life. It tasted great and much better than the store bought frosting.

Dusting of the baking and blogging cobwebs

I won't go into details but life has been pretty hectic for the last month or so, but seems like everything is settling down now, so I'm ready to start blogging and showing my work again.

Did I ever mention how much I love decorating cookies? Something about it just like makes me so happy. I love colors and art in all of it's mediums, even coloring in coloring books. Cookie decorating was love at first site for me. I don't remember what, but I googled something and ended up on Annie's Eats, I saw her cookies and was seriously excited and then I read her royal icing tutorial. I automatically thought "I need to make some of those". Maybe the next day I went out and bought all the basic decorating supplies. At this point I didn't even know yet that there was this huge cookie making community, I'm glad I didn't because I may have never even tried to make any after seeing some of the AMAZING cookies that these ladies make. Let's just say it can be a little intimidating to look at their galleries and flikr pages at times.

The first cookies I ever made were for my friend Maryam, whose wedding I was attending in a couple days. I had a flower cutter that I really liked but I couldn't find a cake cookie cutter in the stores. I didn't have time to order one and I really had my heart set on making cake cookie's. So I thought to draw the flower topped cake design on a styrofoam plate, cut it out, and I used it to cut the cookies out with a knife. I found out Maryam's color theme and I started decorating. People in my family were giving me strange smiles (you know the one were you think the person is going crazy so you just smile and don't say a word) but they humored me, and to my and everyone else's surprise, they came out wonderful!

I can definitely see ALOT of flaws in these now, but I still love them to death and they will probably be my favorite cookies forever.