Sparkling lemon cookies

These cookies are a bit like a lemon short bread with a lemon butter cream filling. The recipe is
from The Kitchen ( http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/cookie-recipe-glittering-lemon-sandwich-cookies-134849 )

Cakes

While I love making cookies I like to mix it up sometimes and make cakes. This first cake is a congratulations cake for my co-worker who was recently accepted into graduate school on a scholarship program (she was 1 out of 80 who applied, only 2 were accepted).
The cake is vanilla, cinnamon, apple, with a layer of caramel icing in the middle of the cake and a spiced butter cream on top. The cake is decorated with some chocolates from a mold and then piped with colored chocolate.
This cake was for a friends birthday. The cake is vanilla and the icing is caramel. It has some more of the poured chocolates and there are some snicker-doodle cookies in the back to support the chocolates. The gifts on top are actually little chocolates ^^ aren't they cute!

Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) Cookies

Hanbok Cookies

Chuseok or Korean Thanksgiving is one of the few important holidays in Korea. It is celebrated with your family. Most of the day is spent honoring the dead and going to temples and tombs. At the end of the day a family will get together and have a big meal. It is tradition to give gifts to the grandparents in the family or the eldest members of a family. Around Chuseok you see huge gift boxes of canned food, toothpaste, win, soap, fruit, and many other things sold in the grocery store.

I never know what to give my husbands family for Chuseok (and he is no help thinking of gifts) This year I decided to do something special. I made them cookies. This was my first attempt at frosted cookies. I fell in love with the process!
The cookies at the top of the page are Hanbok (traditional Korean clothing). On Chuseok you will see older men and women and young children dressed in this style of clothing. They come in all colors, but the colors of the cookies are the traditional colors of Hanbok.
The rest of the cookies are just a hodgepodge of different experiments with the icing.

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 ^^