Holiday Baking

Yesterday Andy and I felt like baking so in the morning while I was busy with breakfast I quickly made a batch of sugar cookie dough and kept it in the fridge till we were ready to bake it later when the housework and other activities for the day was done.

First we cut out gingerbread boys and girls and stars with our cookie cutters and decorated them with choc chips and other sprinkles...

Then when they were baked and cooled I put different colour butter icing in bags and snipped the tip to make it into a piping bag.  To get white butter icing use the white wooden spoon margarine not the yellow marg.  We used white for the facial features and hair and red and blue for the clothes..

Andy iced his own ones...

But got a little carried away with the excitement of icing...

So Mommy had to doctor them a little to avoid hectic hyperactivity...

And then of coarse we ate them...

It was my dad's birthday 2 weeks ago so for the fun of it we thought we'd try our hand at decorating cupcakes in a special way - not just icing and sprinkles.  We were first inspired to be more adventurous with cup cakes when our neighbour blessed us with the most gorgeous gift of gorgeous cup cakes a few weeks ago.  So we found this video and just HAD TO make these super cute sunflowers for my dad's birthday.  The middle is made with oreo's which give the perfect colour and hight and we made the ladybird's out of mini smarties...

To give the petals that variegated, realistic look you put yellow on one side of the piping bag and orange on the other so the two colours pipe out together.

Hope everyone else is also having fun in the kitchen these holidays!