Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

Stamped "Honey Bear" cookies This Summer one of my friends became a grandmother. It's the first one of my friends to have a grandchild so in a curious and indirect way it felt like a sort of "milestone" for me. Especially as she's close to my age!  Her grandchild is in another state and my friend was keeping us all posted with pictures and updates about the birth and her trip to see the baby.  When she returned, we had a get together for her to celebrate. The party was an outdoor potluck. For this occasion I felt a cake would have been too elaborate and it was warm enough that we would have had to deal with buttercream in the heat. So, I decided to make some cute cookies. Looking over my cookie supplies, I saw my Nordic Ware beehive stamp and I thought of combining it with my teddy bear chocolate mold to make some cute Honey Bear Cookies . I knew they would be easy, look different, and please our group.  Here's the cookie stamp, and I only have the beehi...

  Speckled Bunnies Sugar Cookies I can't let Easter go by without making and decorating sugar cookies!  I use a basic recipe from Martha Stewart that I've had for a long time. Here it is: 3 cups flour 3/4 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 2 sticks butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 2 tsp vanilla extract Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Beat butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. Add flour mixture, beat until combined. To make chocolate sugar cookies, replaced 1/3 cup flour with 1/3 cup cocoa powder.  I've been making these sugar cookies for many years and for all occasions. I've never tried any other sugar cookie recipe!  Years ago I used to spend an entire day decorating cookies, using different cutters, making many bags of royal icing in separate outline and flood consistencies, and in different colors. Then I learned to use just one consistency for both outlining and flooding and got away from intricate decorations.  I want to keep u...

 It was so hard to say goodbye to summer this year, but I'm finally in the mood for Fall. Yes, now that it's mid-November! Better late than never.   It was the last session of this Fall's watercolor class.  I wanted to bring something for the other ladies and you can't go wrong with Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies .  I just love  this recipe  from Sally's Bake Blog.  It's so easy and you don't even need a mixer.   I used a 1.5 tablespoon cookie scoop like the recipe calls for, but instead of 18 I ended up getting at least 25 cookies.  I was tired and made the dough the night before, then froze the individual cookie scoops. It was super easy in the morning to bake them and let them cool for an hour before I had to get to class. I didn't get any pictures, but I brought along a pretty Fall plate that I have in the shape of a pumpkin and I arranged them on that.  Everybody liked them, several people said they were so good and one fr...

  "Butterfly" sugar cookies Bubby's afterschool club is having a bake sale tomorrow. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make some decorated cookies!  I thought of an Easter theme, but often schools object to holidays that not everyone celebrates. Plus, we just had the first day of Spring.  The perfect occasion to use my butterfly cookie cutter!  I'd made the dough yesterday morning, always using Martha Stewart's sugar cookie recipe, and baked the cookies in the evening.  So I thought the project would only take me a couple of hours today. But nothing ever goes according to plan!  It took me over an hour to lay out the supplies, make the royal icing, tint it. I like to use  this recipe  from Sally's Baking Blog.  But today I ran into trouble with the consistency. Although in the bowl it looked like 10-second icing, as I piped it, it was still too thick and the piping tips kept getting clogged.  It must have been exceptionally dry in th...

Today I tried a new recipe: Almond Flour Chocolate Chip cookies. I thought they might be just the thing for a condolence visit I'm paying to a friend tomorrow.  Why these?  Because it's something new to try, and I have a lot of almond flour I need to use up. And for a bereavement, chocolate is the thing. In truth I wanted to make a lemon poppyseed bread, or a French apple cake.  But I didn't have the ingredients, and I was worried it might be overkill.  So, I went with these. Here is the recipe. I followed it to the letter, down to even using a cookie scoop, but I got 35 cookies instead of 22.  I baked them for 10 minutes. They are all right, but not better than regular chocolate chip cookies. They're kind of dry and have a grainier consistency.  Would I make them again?  Perhaps, though I don't think so. So many good cookies one can try!   However if I did, I would add some almond extract.  You really can't taste the almond! My family ...

It's Bubby's last year of school and I am missing no opportunities to send in treats to make him proud and help him enjoy his day. I made these simple sugar cookies with pale pink royal icing and he took them in on two days before Valentine's Day. I figured on the day of there would be all kinds of treats, and we knew the day before there would be a snow day. At the last minute the snowstorm went off in another direction, and Bubby reports that on Valentine's day there were no treats to be found anywhere. It figures! However I heard everyone did enjoy these cookies to start off the week.     Valentine's Day sugar cookies  

Bubby's friend was coming over to hang out an a rainy Saturday and I know those boys always like to have a snack.  I only had a couple of hours to make something so I couldn't chill cookie dough.  But I knew I had an opened jar of molasses. Bingo! Time to make Marranitos .  I just love these Mexican cookie/breads.  Are they breads?  That's what they're called in recipes, but they're actually more like cookies.  You do roll out the dough, cut them with a cutter and bake them for 10 minutes. It's a cookie! A soft, dense, gingery cinnamony comforting and delicious cookie. Traditionally they're shaped like pigs but you could use any cutter, though I'm glad I invested in  this  cookie cutter because it just makes them extra. After all, "marranitos" is Spanish for little piggies! Aside from not needing to chill the dough the good thing about marranitos is that you can't mess them up.  Today I didn't have any dark brown sugar so I used light i...

I made these Sugar Pumpkin Cookies for a bake sale for an after-school club of Bubby's. I relied on my old Martha Stewart recipe for the cookies and  my favorite royal icing recipe . I used 10 tablespoons of water which worked out great on this particular day (it does depend on the level of humidity on any given day). Lately I'd been adding 9 tablespoons then had to add extra water afterwards. I don't have any orange food coloring, so I made an orange color using red and yellow. It was a bit peachy but once piped it was OK. I used brown for the stems.  With such flowy icing, I piped the two outer sections of the pumpkin on a few cookies at a time, let them set for a few minutes, then went back and piped the middle section and the stem.  In this way the icing didn't flow together (as happened with the first few cookies I piped) and I was able to show the three distinct sections I wanted.  In spite of the low humidity on this day these took almost 24 hours to dry, so ...

On a busy and tired Monday, there just wasn't time to make anything fancy for a book club party in the evening. Luckily I thought of Spritz Cookies and it was the perfect idea!  No chilling the dough, they bake up in 7 minutes, and they look so pretty and are so tasty.  I use  this recipe  from Sallys Bake Blog and  this press . The first few times I made them after I got my press it was tough to get the hang of it, and even now with some of the disks the dough will cling to the press.  But I've learned to use room temperature dough and unlined baking sheets and although in the past I've needed to chill the baking sheets, this time the opposite happened, and the cookies stayed better on a room temperature sheet.  I have no idea why. These cookies were part of a dessert array that included cannelés, skull-shaped caramels, and apple tartlets with whipped cream, all made by the host.  Even in the face of such stiff competition, they were a success! ...

This year I made several dozen  Decorated Sugar Cookies,  some for us to enjoy and some to send to my family and friends in the Caribbean. When I send them baked goods I always try to mail the package on a Monday, in hopes they will arrive by the following Saturday at latest, and avoid an overnight in a post office somewhere. I made one batch of  Chocolate Sugar Cookies  and one batch Vanilla . I used an egg shaped cutter, a large bunny head cutter, and a bunny cutter.  I always use  this royal icing recipe  from Sallys Bake Blog and although I'm not the biggest fan of royal icing, I think it does have a pretty good taste and never fails to dry no matter how much water I end up adding.  I do recommend this recipe.  I made five colors: a blue, a pink, a green, a yellow, and a purple.  Pretty basic! I flooded the bunnies in pink and the eggs in blue.  My original idea was to do a floral design, inspired by  this tutorial ...