Day 5 of 12 Days of Creepmas Blog Hop - Easy Skelly Cookies

On the 5th day of Creepmas Smeared and Smudged blog hop my true love gave to me a Nightmare Before Christmas party!  Don't you just love all the fabulous projects all the bloggers have created for the hop?  In case this is your first visit to The Smeared and Smudged 12 Days of Creepmas blog hop,  click in here for all the skinny

If you're hopping, you've arrived here from the very awesome Ike's World.

My project is below the blog roll.  Be sure to visit all the creepy bloggers and leave some comment love!

Blog Roll

Smeared and Smudged

Lady B

Silvia

Wendy

Carla

Leigh

Shell

Loren C

Kelli

Black Dragon

Suzi McKenzie

Windy

Glittery Kate

Alison

Julia

Jane

Monique

Jenn

Ike

Candace - You are here

Lisa Hall

Steph

Susan S.

Four months ago my grand nieces and nephews and I started a tradition of having one creative party every month.  Each kid gets to host one in turn.  They choose a theme, create the dinner menu, create an invitation (if they want to) and choose a craft.  It's up to them to decide how much they want to do.  At the very least, they choose a theme and a craft idea that I flesh out.  AND they get to sit in the big craft chair in the studio at the party (they really like that part).

They youngest kidlet wanted a Nightmare Before Christmas party and you can guess how excited I was!  He wanted chicken nuggets and fries for dinner and skull cookies for dessert.  Oh, and Dr Pepper.  The parents come for dinner too, so Hubby gets to augment the menu for them.  I say "gets to" because he loves to cook for people.  

The craft was a paper skull.  That left me a lot of leeway.  I managed to find free Nightmare Before Christmas coloring pages (though I question the validity of said FREE pages because Disney owns the images, therefore I won't show them).  We made ornaments using Jack's head, his bat bow tie and  a bell.  I printed both images forward and backward, so they could be put back to back.  They colored the images with glittery gel pens, cut them out and glued them together with the ribbon between. 

On to the cookies!  I use Wilton's Roll Out Cookie Recipe, with the exception that I used their older recipe that called for 1 cup of sugar.  I cut them out with the rim of a cup.  When they were cooled, I iced them with melted white chocolate.  Your just pour it on and shake the cookie to spread it.  I found a Wilton Cookie Icing in black on sale, so that's what I used for the space.  Now, the Cookie Icing is on the wet side and spreads a lot, so the key is to squeeze on a little at a time for the eyes, touch the tip to the cookie without squeezing for the nostrils and move quickly across the cookie, without touching it. for the mouth.  Use a tooth pick to draw across the mouth for the detail.  

The most important thing is to get into a rhythm and not worry about making each one perfect.  Make a few extra for practice.  Enjoy!

 Now, off to the lovely Lisa Hall for some more fabulous fun!

    

Reindeer Remnants

Some cookies never made it to the cookie trays this year. Without my daughter helping me, I ruined a whole batch of reindeer cookies because they were under done. Those poor, poor cookies.

Holiday Cookies

Here is your virtual tray of cookies from me to you.  There are the perennial favorites as well as some newbies.  The box below tells what each cookie is.  My daughter usually helps me, but working 12 hour shifts at the U of U Hospital and nursing prerequisite classes kept her busy this year.  We create a theme for the cutout cookies because they are the stars of the show.  The baking take about 3 days.  We do them each year for our family and friends. Peace is the theme for this year.  Have some!

We use the old Wiltion recipe for the cutouts.  They added more flour a few years ago.  The old recipe uses 2 3/4 cups which can be tricky in the handling, but stays very buttery tasting even to the last roll out.   We decorate with royal icing which dries very hard.  The reindeer is everyone's favorite.  Janice helped me bring character to them with those awesome eyes.  She's a wonderful cartoonist!  Below are her designs for the tropical Christmas theme we did a few years ago.  

That was a turning point for our process.  Folks so loved the different designs that it uped our game AND our enjoyment of the process. 

 

It is not in the nature of artists to produce the same thing over and over.  It's so much fun to begin the design challenge!  Blue crabs for Christmas is a Maryland thing.

 

My favorite art professor told me that art begins with a problem and ends with a solution.  That's how we approach a theme - we ask "What if.."  Then the fun begins.

 Once we decide on a theme, Janice starts sketching.  She's learned the basic decorating from me, but she doesn't have my patience.  She'll do the first one, then I do the basics and she'll go behind me to do details. 

 

 We look for new recipes to try and edit our collections accordingly.

  

 The year we did these cookies, we were all about bling.  We wanted to use melted candy accents where ever we could.

 

 They were lovely, but found that the "work to looks to taste" factors was out of balance.

 

 The Christmas Margarita was inspired.  I was psyched to use this cookie cutter!

 

I can't resist buying a new cookie cutter!  I always check them at the craft and kitchen stores.  I have a separate set in my studio to use with clay media.

 

Sometimes you can use a generic shape, like the one above to make a cool new design!  
This year I made extra reindeer.  I was flying through them so fast that I had a whole pan that was underdone.  I lost half of them trying to move them off the tray.  Normally that's not a problem, I would set them aside for Hubby to eat.  But the carnage was so great that I just went with it. Sooo, Janice got a tray of roadkill cookies, from one warped soul to another.  She gets me.

 

We finally started keeping a cookie book last year.  We hope to hand it down to the next generation of cookie makers.