Ali Sweeney
04-07-2007, 06:14 PM
Oh man! I had the FULL ON Martha day yesterday. It was awesome and exhausting. Okay, so I was looking through this fab 'Celebrations' book my friend gave me for Christmas, it. I just like reading through it! So many good party ideas. Anyway, it totally got me in a crafty mood. So I went to Martha Stewart's site and looked through her Easter suggestions. I ended up going with cute little mini-baskets made from paper cups, crepe paper and floral wire. (Am at the Coffee Bean typing this and this lady just said 'excuse me' and brushed past me to get her drink and then turned back and said "wow, you have a really positive aura!" and then kept going. I love LA!;) )
Where was I? Floral wire, right. So to go along with the baskets I decided to decorate some eggs. Martha had some good 'egg ornaments' so I got stuff for that too. While I was at it, she showed how to make these sweet looking "egg votives" so I bought wax to try making a few of those too, And... while I was letting the eggs dry – some of the egg decoration instructions called for me to poke pin holes at the tip of the egg and remove the insides while keeping shell intact (wasn’t easy! You can't make an omelet...:rolleyes: ) anyway, so while the insides of 11 eggs dried, I decided I didn’t want to waste the insides of the eggs… so I busted out the butter sugar and made sugar cookies! I have a train, airplane, and race car cookie cutters, and a rabbit cookie cutter. So I made several of each. But the rabbit one is hard because its more of a vague shape and requires skillful icing - and I don’t have a lot of experience decorating. Julie (Billie) is the expert cake/cookie decorator! She has these amazing pictures of cakes she’s decorated. I should have called her for advice, but I ended up using a few shapes as my testers and I got better as I went. It was fun and the cookies turned out delicious.
I started with white, pink (trying to be red) and blue icings. With all my other projects going, I didn’t end up icing the cookies until 10pm and my hands were already totally blue & red from dying the eggs. So when I tasted the icing, I thought it was all soapy! Yuck! I threw out the rest of the batch before I considered that the soap might be on my fingers, not the icing. :o Dave thought the completed cookies tasted great. He saved me from throwing any away, but I called it a day anyway, and started fresh on icing today! Dave and Ben helped me decorate the airplane and train cookies since I didn’t have a good visual of the appearance. The trains look like “Thomas the Train” with a 1 on the side. I did the best I could with the bunny cookies... they’re cute but not as precise as the others.
Wait - backing up - Ben LOVED helping me dye the eggs. The kit came with a white crayon which you draw on the egg first, and then when you dip it, the dye sticks everywhere but there. So ben requested a happy face on one egg, which he then 'dropped' (major splash) in the pink bowl. He mixed several colors which created a really deep blue and a lime-green. He was very good at rolling the eggs to make sure they got color all over. His hands are all blue and red too. Lol. It’s a good thing I’m not working on Monday because my hands are still pink and blue in the nails, no matter how hard I scrub or hot the water is. :D :p
So, Happy Easter to all of you celebrating tomorrow. And Happy Spring to EVERYONE!!!
XOXO
Ali
Where was I? Floral wire, right. So to go along with the baskets I decided to decorate some eggs. Martha had some good 'egg ornaments' so I got stuff for that too. While I was at it, she showed how to make these sweet looking "egg votives" so I bought wax to try making a few of those too, And... while I was letting the eggs dry – some of the egg decoration instructions called for me to poke pin holes at the tip of the egg and remove the insides while keeping shell intact (wasn’t easy! You can't make an omelet...:rolleyes: ) anyway, so while the insides of 11 eggs dried, I decided I didn’t want to waste the insides of the eggs… so I busted out the butter sugar and made sugar cookies! I have a train, airplane, and race car cookie cutters, and a rabbit cookie cutter. So I made several of each. But the rabbit one is hard because its more of a vague shape and requires skillful icing - and I don’t have a lot of experience decorating. Julie (Billie) is the expert cake/cookie decorator! She has these amazing pictures of cakes she’s decorated. I should have called her for advice, but I ended up using a few shapes as my testers and I got better as I went. It was fun and the cookies turned out delicious.
I started with white, pink (trying to be red) and blue icings. With all my other projects going, I didn’t end up icing the cookies until 10pm and my hands were already totally blue & red from dying the eggs. So when I tasted the icing, I thought it was all soapy! Yuck! I threw out the rest of the batch before I considered that the soap might be on my fingers, not the icing. :o Dave thought the completed cookies tasted great. He saved me from throwing any away, but I called it a day anyway, and started fresh on icing today! Dave and Ben helped me decorate the airplane and train cookies since I didn’t have a good visual of the appearance. The trains look like “Thomas the Train” with a 1 on the side. I did the best I could with the bunny cookies... they’re cute but not as precise as the others.
Wait - backing up - Ben LOVED helping me dye the eggs. The kit came with a white crayon which you draw on the egg first, and then when you dip it, the dye sticks everywhere but there. So ben requested a happy face on one egg, which he then 'dropped' (major splash) in the pink bowl. He mixed several colors which created a really deep blue and a lime-green. He was very good at rolling the eggs to make sure they got color all over. His hands are all blue and red too. Lol. It’s a good thing I’m not working on Monday because my hands are still pink and blue in the nails, no matter how hard I scrub or hot the water is. :D :p
So, Happy Easter to all of you celebrating tomorrow. And Happy Spring to EVERYONE!!!
XOXO
Ali