First Birthday Cookies

In Korea 1st birthdays are a big deal. It is the only time a birthday is really celebrated. It was recently my friends son's (Lee Tae-Gyum) birthday. I made him some cookies for the celebration. The cookies say the birthday boys name ^^

Wedding Cookies

One of my old co-workers is getting married. For her wedding present I made her some shortbread cookies iced them and then painted them with food coloring. The cookies say the groom (Kim Yeong-Chan) and brides (Park Ji-Young) names. The cookies with the lattice work on them were painted with a mix of homemade simple syrup and food coloring before being baked.

Snowmen cakes

I needed a quick treat as a Christmas gift for one of my husbands friends. I made these snowman cakes. I cheated and used a box of cake mix and baked it. Then when the cake was cool I cut the snowmen out using a cookie cutter. I then sliced the snowmen in half and spread some jam on one side and put the sandwich back together. The last step was to pour some melted white chocolate on the top of the snowmen and some dark chocolate for their hats. I use a toothpick dipped in chocolate to paint on their faces and buttons. If I would have had more time (and chocolate) I would have dipped them completely but I kid of like how you can see their jam filling.
Enjoy ^^

Christmas Tree Cookie Tower

I saw these Christmas trees made of cookies featured on the kitchen (http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/holidays-christmas/festive-and-impressive-cookie-trees-135006?image_id=2062514)

I decided I had to make my own but with a few variations. All of the instructions on the website suggest using royal icing to bind the cookies together. However thought it would be hard to pick the cookies off one at a time to eat them. So I made my own variation instead of gluing the cookies together with icing I cut small holes in the middle of each cookie and stacked them up around a disposable chopstick (for stability) that way people could just slide the cookies off the stick nice and easy ^^

What you need: Your favorite cut out cookie recipe (I used a sugar cookie recipe)

Graduated Star cookie cutters

Chopstick or sucker stick

Royal Icing

Optional:

Green food coloring

Small candies for decorations

First role out your cookies. Cut out 3 of each size of star cookie (my set has 5 stars if your set has less you may want to cut out 4 cookies or 5)

Cut or poke holes in the middle of your cookies (I used a

chopstick to poke a hole in the middle of the cookie and wiggled it around a little bit to make the hole bigger)

Bake your cookies and when they come out of the oven check to be sure that the hole is big enough to fit the chopstick in. (you may have to make the holes a bit bigger by gently poking the chopstick through the hole you already made)

Once the cookies are cool mix up a batch of royal icing (add green food coloring if you want)

Pipe the edges of the cookies and then fill.

You can add a star to the top of your tree by "gluing" two small stars together with royal icing and then dipping them in some yellow icing.

Add decorations to the tip of the cookies or put some sugar on the icing to make it look like snow.

(You can add luster dust to the cookies when the icing is dry, I am living in Korea right now so I don’t have such luxuries available to me so I just used some regular sugar.)

When your icing has dried (I suggest a full day but 3-4 hours is ok) you can stack your cookies.

Enjoy your Christmas Tree Cookie Tower!

All Gift Wrapped and Ready to Go ^^