Well, here I am!

After much consideration I decided that I'm going to dive in and start blogging. Who knows where this is going to go or what's going to happen along the way. I welcome any comments or suggestions.

Today I wanted to attempt making cookies like I've seen over at Amanda's blog http://iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker/ . Her cakes and cookies are gorgeous! My other source for information was Kate at http://katesworldbykate.blogspot.com/ . Kate's got a couple of recipes that I hope to try out soon.

I started with Amanda's recipe for sugar cookies. I also used her icing recipe. I followed the directions exactly and refridgerated my dough for an hour but when I took it out and went to roll it out things started to go wrong. In my effort to not destroy my kitchen this afternoon I decided to roll the dough out between two sheets of wax paper and then transfer the cookies to the baking sheet. But when I went to move the cookies the lost their shape and looked like big blobs. So I figured that I'd just roll the doug out on the cookie sheet and remove the excess from around the shapes I was using. I did that but my dough rolling techinque must need some work because I had a circle of cookies and nothing at either end of the cookie sheet. I went ahead and put the first sheet in the oven for six minutes. When the timer went off the cookies weren't done so I left them in the oven for two more minutes. After that I took them out and let them cool. The only problem was that I didn't anticipate how much the cookies would spread out during the baking process. After they cooled I just took the cookie cutter and re-cut the cookies. That seemed to work out okay for me.

While the first batch of cookies were baking I went ahead and put the cookie dough in the freezer. My thought that maybe it didn't get cold enough originally. When I took it out a little while later it was a lot firmer and rolled out better. I still think that there has to be an easier way. I'll have to consult The Google to see what I can find out.

I didn't really have any issues with making the icing. The recipe was really easy to follow. Once I started to do the outlining on my cookies I realized that I probably should have made the icing a little thicker to begin with because it was really runny/thin. This is how we learn! After the border dried I filled in the centers of the cookies. I've got a lot to learn to make my cookies look as good as Amanda's and Kate's but at least I've got my feet wet.

Here are some pictures of my finished products.

I've got to play around with my lighting and using the flash on my camera etc.