It's a Boy!

Not for me... My sister-in-law is having a little boy in December. I really can't express how excited I am for her because it has truly been a long and difficult road for her and her husband along the way. I won't go into too many details to respect her privacy, but I can't think of any more deserving parents. So, with a lot of help from fellow family, we threw her a surprise baby shower on Friday. Now I love, love, love to cook, but luckily the only thing I ended up being in charge of was hosting the shower at my house and making favors. With two little ones, it can be really difficult to cook for a crowd, and my dad and trusty co-conspirator in the kitchen was away on a fishing trip so I didn't have a whole lot of help to fall back on. So I was kind of relieved to know I wouldn't be in charge of food.

I thought long and hard about what to make for shower favors and decided an edible treat was my best bet. Lets be honest ladies, where do shower favors go- in the trash. So instead of pouring my heart and soul into something destined for the landfill, I went the cookie route. I remembered Lorelei of Mermaid Sweets had made sugar cookie cut-outs with a onesie cookie cutter a couple months back and took my inspiration from her. She was even kind enough to provide me with a recipe for the cookie dough and icing (I really like my sugar cookie recipe but they tend to rise a little which can make decorating them tricky). I hit the internet in search of a onesie cookie cutter and found this really cute site called Karen's Cookies. Not only did they have the onesie cookie cutter, but also ones in the shape of a baby carriage and bib. Best yet, they had a set shaped like feet. My brother-in-law is a podiatrist so these were perfect! And what is cuter than little baby feet?

I baked the cookies early in the week and set out to decorate them Thursday night after my girls went to bed. Just a note, probably not the best idea to start decorating cookies at nine o'clock at night. By the time I made the icing and colored it, it was pushing ten o'clock and I ended up staying up a little past midnight decorating them! But it was well worth it... I had never decorated with flood icing before and was amazed at how easy it was. The icing looks just like what you would find in a bakery. Even though they weren't perfect, I was very pleased with the end result. The only thing I would do different next time is do all the flood icing early in the day, let them dry, and then pipe on the details. Some of the piped icing was kind of absorbed into the flood icing because the flood icing was still wet, but I really didn't have much a choice considering the time!

Everybody loved these cookies. They loved the taste, they loved the icing (I flavored with lemon juice), and the loved how they were decorated. And I was satisfied knowing all my hard work would be enjoyed instead of tossed aside... And my sister-in-law loved them which was the most important part! Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to decorate the feet because I ran out of pastry bags and didn't have any ziploc bags, but the kids at the shower loved them!

I thought I would also share some of our pumpkin creations my daughter and I made as well. Not food, but food related! If you're looking for a safe alternative to carved pumpkins, I love this idea I saw to make candy pumpkins. My daughter picked out which candy to use and I glued the pieces onto the pumpkin using a hot glue gun. Obviously, you have to pick candy that won't melt when the glue hits it and will stay relatively intact once exposed for any length of time (candy corn, M&M's, tootsie rolls, life savers, etc.). We had a really fun time decorating these and I thought they turned out super cute.

Then I decided to get ambitious and wanted to carve the baby's name into a pumpkin for a center piece on the dining room table. I printed out his name on computer paper and then copied the design onto the pumpkin. I had picked up one of those pumpkin carving kits at Michael's and used the little saw to carve the pumpkin. About an hour later and after much deliberation as to how I was going to carve the a's, I finished. Not perfect but still very cute. Later in the day I couln't quite figure out why my hands where aching so bad when it dawned on me that it was from carving the pumpkin! Oh well, small price to pay, right?! At least everything looked nice and everyone had a great time!