As I was decorating these "Believe" Cookies for some Kindergarten students, I was thinking about how powerful this word is and how often I saw the word Believe this year. 

While I was making the 12 Days of Christmas videos, I took a trip on memory lane and noticed that at a very early age I showed interest in the culinary arts. I thought about how much I had learned by watching my mom do her baking and cooking. Later as I grew up I had the chance to start baking and selling cookies and carrot cupcakes. I sold so many carrot cupcakes that my mom thought I was turning into an Oompa Loompa due to the orange tint on my hands. I even went to the doctor and it turns out I wasn't but instead had too much beta carotene from the carrots I handled. 

Well coming back to the theme of "Believe".... I believe that each of us is born with a special gift. When you are a kid your parents help you discover it and later on you continue nurturing until it is time you put it to action. The more you share it and enrich the life of others is when that gift fulfills its purpose. 

12 Days of Christmas Cookies🎄🎄🎄

I can't believe we are in the 4th Day of Christmas Cookies videos, how can it be that times goes by so fast? Since I started with this project I wanted to write a post about and until now I am doing it.

Making these cookies and videos have made me reflect on how much I enjoy baking and how blessed I am to had the chance to start leaning  at a very early age. 

Our busiest decorated cookie season is in full swing, and lately I have noticed that people like to start buying their cookies earlier than years before.  

So if you were thinking of starting to make your cookies closer to Christmas, I would recommend to start as soon as you can and have some cookies handy for the early birds. 

Normally decorated cookies have a very good shell life, you can start baking your cookies now and after they cool down you can put them in a big cellophane bag or in an air tight sealed container. 

Also you can use this cute little bear, named Fox Run Terracota Brown Sugar Bear,  that will help keep your cookies fresh for longer, you just need to put it in the same container as your cookies.

I also like to have royal icing ready beforehand and when I need to decorate some cookies I just prepare the consistencies and tint it in the colors I will need. 

Now let me tell you what are some of the trends on decorated cookies for this Holiday:

Cookie Decorating Kits

Cookie decorating kits are very popular, in particular for Christmas parties. One thing that you will have to consider is who will be decorating those cookies. If the cookie decorating kits are for kids, try to make simple shapes or stamped cookies, so the kids can have a guide on how to decorate the cookies. For the icing, don't go very fancy on the meringue powder you will use to make it, because normally the cookies will be eaten before the icing gets hard. Also just one consistency will be enough, I like to use the magic consistency for the kid's kits and tint it in fun colors and put a lot, I mean a lot of sprinkles, the kids LOVE sprinkles, especially the mixed sprinkles. 

The mixed sprinkles you can make on your own. Michaels offers a great variety of sprinkles, just before you go shopping make up your mind in what color scheme you will make your mix, if not you will go crazy with so many options. 

If you are going to make the cookie decorating kits for adults, you can make more intricate shapes of cookies and it will be good to use a fancier meringue powder. Try to make medium and flooding consistency icings, the medium consistency icing for outlining in a natural color and at least 3 tinted flooding consistency icing pastry bags.

Don't forget to add a little cards with instructions on how to decorate and preserve the cookies. 

Paint Your Own (PYO) Cookies

These cookies are a hit all the time, there are three different ways for how you can make the PYO cookies. One is that you will put the watercolor palette on the cookies, here is a tutorial for this kind. Click here

Another one is to make two cookies, one with the drawing and one for the watercolor palette. For the water color palettes I put the food gel color directly on the iced cookie. 

And last but not least you can use edible ink printed watercolor swatches, these are very fancy, not too expensive and the cookies will look very nice and neat. 

For the drawings you can use stencils or if you are good with drawing you can have fun making cute Holiday drawings once the royal icing is completely dry.  You can use edible markers, an airbrush tool or edible spray paint.

Remember that you will need to put a little brush and instructions on how to decorate these cookies, on Etsy you can find great options and you can also find brushes at the dollar store. 

Itsy-Bitsy Christmas Cookies

This is another huge trend, they are really cute, they have less calories, they are more affordable and if you will ship them you can use First class mail instead of Priority mail.   I really love to make this kind of cookie, my kitchen does not get too messy and you can put your creativity in action. 

Sweet Treats Boards

This is the sweet version of a charcuterie board, these boards include all sorts of cookies, like gingerbread, chocolate chip, royal icing cookies, linzer, shortbread, pretzels, granola bars and they also have a little section for hot drinks, you can add chocolate bombs, chocolate spoons, honey straws, marshmallows, etc. etc...

Gingerbread Cookies Ready To Go

This is a huge trend, everything that is ready to go is very appreciate now a days, you can sell a kit with gingerbread ornaments or an already assemble ginger bread house, with the icing and a lot, I mean a lot of candies.

You cannot go wrong with any of these options, and the Holiday is the perfect time for you to try these ideas out and gift them to someone special!

Apart from loving cookies, I love fragrances and smelling things, nice things of course. Thus, I am ecstatic because I had the opportunity to make some special cookies for Lancôme. They have a sensorial campaign where they display some of their perfumes with shortbread cookies that follow a recipe that were developed with flavors inspired in those same fragrances, how cool is that?

I am fascinated with the art of perfume making and I love to learn more about the notes that are found in some of my favorite fragrances. 

When I agreed to make the cookies, I was a little nervous because they gave me a recipe to follow. Since I normally sell my cookies using my own recipe, it was interesting for me to see how well I could stick to their creative recipe. So, I took a risk, I made a small batch of the cookies to see how the recipe worked, and the cookies turned out really, really, really well. 

Let me share with you an excerpt by Lancôme behind the perfume “La Vie Est Belle”

"The concept of the fragrance is centered on the idea of natural and simple beauty, freedom from conventions and the choice of once own vision of happiness. The fragrance is a kind of outlook on life, inspired by joy and pleasure in small things.

This gourmand yet elegant composition is developed by perfumers Olivier Polge, Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo. The final formula is the result achieved after three years of probation and 5000 versions. Iris is the key ingredient of the perfume, surrounded by orange blossoms and jasmine in the heart. The composition’s opening provides fruity flavors of black currant and pear, while the base is warm, gourmand and powdery due to almond-like accords of tonka bean, praline, patchouli and vanilla. "

Wow, I love the description of the perfume! While I was making the cookie dough, adding the cotton candy extract paired with the pink and red food gel color, I was transported to Fauchon in France, sweet and sophisticated at the same time. Oh la la!!

For the Idôle inspired cookies the freshness of the lime juice, the warmth of the vanilla, and the yellow food gel color were in perfect harmony to create a cookie inspired in a modern, fresh and clean fragrance.

“Idôle was created by Shyamala Maisondieu, Adriana Medina-Baez and Nadege le Garlantezec.  Idôle Eau de Parfum grants those who wear it the unwavering strength to dare to dream bigger. 

This fresh and clean fragrance is ever-evolving throughout the day with bursts of inviting florals, energizing citrus and sultry white musks. Top notes are Pear and Bergamot; middle notes are Turkish Rose, Rose de Mai and Indian Jasmine; base notes are White Musk and Vanilla.”

In order to make this kind of recipe you need to be a little more patient. This is because the dough is so soft that sometimes it can give you a hard time while rolling it out and during the baking process. Shortbread cookies are most commonly baked in a baking pan and cut out after baking.

 I just posted a video on YouTube  about the differences in between a shortbread and a sugar cookie, please check it out! 

I was so happy to see my cookies on Lancôme's beauty counter, they look so pretty next to the perfumes! Thank you Lancôme for coming out with such a great campaign and so happy to be part of it! 

 I hope you enjoy my journey with Lancôme, and I encourage you to infuse some of your favorite notes into your cookie creations.

Recently I have been thinking that sometimes we waste our time trying to fix the things we simply cannot fix. We should instead let things be and enjoy the moments that we spend with family and friends.  

In particular these couple of years have been very hard for so many. It has been so sad to lose so many friends and family members so unexpectedly. So this Day of the Dead I want to remember each one of them and thank them for the laughter and the special moments we shared with them.

I have had the opportunity to participate in various Day of Dead festivals and it brings me so much joy to share these traditions.

The first one I participated in was abut 15 years ago, and it seems that it was just yesterday.  My friend and I set up a huge altar in a history museum. It was so beautiful and my mom brought a lot of sugar skulls and alfeñiques all the way from Mexico. I really appreciate her effort in traveling with all of that, I wish I could still have all of the things she brought me. One of the things we still have are a couple of paper mache skeletons. 

I recently was invited to showcase my creations in another Day of the Dead festivals. I didn't have too much time to decorate many cookies, but my husband gave me the idea to sell Pan de Muerto. This bread is one of the most important elements of the Altar. This bread is eaten in the cemeteries at the gravesite or placed as a tribute called an ofrenda.

We LOVE Pan de Muerto, it is a very soft sweetened round bun, (similar to brioche) often decorated with bone-shaped phalange pieces. It is flavored with orange blossom water and anis de estrella (anise) and after it comes out of the oven it is sprinkled with sugar. In our house we normally pair it with hot Mexican chocolate. 

Here are some pictures of the event, the PYO cookies and the DIY cookie kits were a hit. The weather was perfect for an outside event and we were super happy to share some of our traditions. 

I was especially proud to help families have a memorable moment through their cookie creations or enjoying a delicious Pan de Muerto. 

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Fondant Cookies for your trick or treaters!

Last year a client asked me to make some  fondant cookies, and since then I have been venturing out of my royal icing comfort  zone and have been decorating cookies with fondant. Let me tell you that I am loving it!

 I am so happy that finally CookieCon is happening right now! 

I have never got the chance to attend to one of those conventions, but I am so happy that The Cookie Couture has been  present  since 2018. 

The organizers are the sweetest persons ever and I am so glad that they  give the opportunity to small business to be part of the Sponsor program. 

If you are passionate about cookie decorating and sugar art, you would love to attend to one of those conventions, there are a lot opportunities to learn new techniques, see new products, hands on classes and the speakers are always great cookie artists. 

You can apply to be a sponsor and you can cover the fee with gifts that meet the requirements or paying the fee. 

 Royal Icing color trends for fall 2021

Since Fall 2020, I noticed that the color trends and designs for Halloween cookies were changing and instead of being the traditional bright colors and spooky cookies, they were more subtle and sweet.

And this year the cuteness and pastel color cookies are making a big scene on Instagram and Pinterest.

Here is the video:

And  as a "Trendy girl",  as a good friend from High school described me, I am very excited to tint some royal icing with new shades of food gel color. 

I had these food gel colors in my color drawer waiting for me to use them.  I used Wedge-wood, gold, eggplant, moss, watermelon and coral red, all of these colors are from Americolor.

I prepared magic consistency icing and divided in several mini containers to tint the icing, I started by adding just a tiny touch of each of the gel colors and covered some cookies with it, then I added more gel to each container to achieve a darker shade, but still in the soft pastel color range.