May Cookies

As part of my birthday the previous month, I had purchased some instruction on how to do tipless bag florals using royal icing.  So, I took the small bouquet I had made for myself from Laura's leftover Mother's Day flowers and used it as inspiration to practice.

 Out of the blue I had a woman contact me about wanting cookies for her gathering before she left on her mission to Texas.  Her name was Sundee so she thought it would be fun to have a little sun in the general area of Austin where she had been called.  She had me do 5 dozen.

When she came to pick them up I was expecting a young woman but it turns out she was a cute Senior sister!

Ben's old teacher from South Cache contacted me and asked if I would make cookies for her baby's first birthday.  She sent me some inspo pics and said she trusted me.

I ended up sticking pretty close to her pictures.

I had been really frustrated the last 2 or 3 orders because I was getting a lot of color bleed :(

(look at the blue tail under "Rookie")

For that reason I ended up charging a bit less on those orders.

I was pretty proud of the detail on my baseballs...

I punched holes through the icing to try and make it look like they were really sewn.

While making these and struggling with the bleeding problem again, I was at the point where I was wondering if I could continue taking cookie orders.  I was researching online to try and find a solution but nothing I tried seemed to fix my problem.  It is super frustrating to spend so much time on cookies only to find the next morning that they have bled :(  There is nothing to be done at that point and I felt like I was letting customers down.

Well, I ran into Cindy Atkin at Love to Cook amidst the process of making these.  She is the cookie queen of the valley.  I expressed my frustrations and she gave me several things to try.  One of which was using a fan to help crust the icing over immediately after flooding.  I am happy to report that this has for the most part fixed my bleeding problem!  I am so grateful to her for her advice!