Meet the “cake-mix cookie”:

I googled “chocolate cookies” and found a recipe for cake-mix cookies. Basically, all you do is eliminate the water in the recipe; you simply add 1/3 cup oil and 3 eggs to the cake mix, add 2 cups of chocolate chips, or butterscotch chips or peanut butter chips (whatever you like). Bake for 8-10 minutes and enjoy.

Simple. And delicious!

Last night I attended a cookie exchange party. At first, I didn’t really know what to expect. I know the hostess in a roundabout way, but I haven’t seen her in years. But I decided, what the heck. I love to bake holiday goodies and I’m always up for a night out.

Wow. Was I in for a treat!

So, I baked 12 dozen treats (I made chocolate peppermint bark). But then I thought they were too small, so I added a dozen chocolate-dipped pretzels (that I also made) to each. Being new to the group and wanting to impress, I wrapped ‘em up all pretty in festive goodie bags with lovely red ribbon bows. I piled ‘em all in a box and headed out for the long drive to Debbi’s.

When I arrived, I saw that all the other guests had taken the exchange even more seriously than I did! There were several different cookie tins, mini paint cans, even chinese take-out boxes full of baking. The hostess even presented her goodies on a gilded platter topped with a red satin bow holding a large, brass cookie cutter. Oh, so very Martha! I felt somewhat cowed by the length (and expense!) the others had gone to. I’d briefly considered the mini paint cans myself, but figured the $2 price tag was too much; who spends $24 on a cookie exchange, anyway? Now I know who! Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I posted the super-cute cupcakes I made for Girl1 to take to school for her b-day treat and weren’t they just “aww, shucks“?

Well, not to let Girl2 go without special mom-baked treats, I made these puppies for the preschool Hallowe’en party.

Now, look closely…

What are they?

No, not ghosts…

…think pharaoh

…think dead pharaoh…

They’re mummies!

Now, granted, this was my inspiration:

And he has rather more icing on him than mine do, but I only had one bottle of cookie icing and I was afraid of running out. Plus I didn’t have time to pre-make scary yellow royal icing eyes, and I couldn’t find any pre-made candy eyes, so we had to use plastic googly-eyes and just warned everyone not to eat the eyes!

Anyway, they were a hit with the kiddles, and Girl2 and her new bestest preschool friend enjoyed licking off all the icing, playing with the eyes and abandoning the gingerbread man beneath. Such is life!

One of the great joys of mothering, in my humble opinion, is baking remarkably attractive goodies for my kids to share with their friends. In the same vein, one of the great joys of having a child whose birthday is four days before Hallowe’en is baking really, really cool Hallowe’en-themed cupcakes for her to bring to school on her birthday.This year I had a lot of plain white rolled fondant left over from a cake I’d made a few weeks earlier for a friend’s baby shower, so I surfed around searching for spooky cupcakes using rolled fondant. Surprisingly, there were several options, but Girl1 and I settled on these cute cakes.

They were so easy to make, too! We baked 36 smallish devil’s food cupcakes (Girl1 liked the idea of devil’s food for Hallowe’en) and frosted them with chocolate buttercream icing (dead easy to make from scratch, too). Then we rolled out very thin circles of the rolled fondant (I’ve never made this from scratch, always just bought the Wilton pre-made stuff), draped it over the cupcakes and used a straw to poke the holes, which look like the ghost’s eyes.

Of course, we both got rave reviews from the students, teachers and other moms at the school and that, by the way, is a not insignificant reason why I go to such lengths to make these amazing goodies for my gals.

Tips for anyone who’s thinking of reproducing them? Make sure your fondant circle (the ghost itself) is big enough to cover the frosted part of the cupcake, but not so big as to cover the entire cupcake. I realized this too late and used waaaaaay too much fondant. Talk about sugar overload…the kids ate it all (except my girl who didn’t like the way the chocolate buttercream had touched the white fondant…memories of myself and gravy touching peas…). Were I to make them again (next year, maybe?) I would use a leftover paper cupcake liner (flattened out) as my template. I think it would be just about the perfect size.

Here’s the provenance of our particular ghosties:
I found a recipe idea here, and she seems to have gotten her idea here.