Gone Fishin'

FLOUR BOX BAKERY UPDATE: The stork is visiting Flour Box Bakery this summer. As a result, I am not currently accepting new orders. My baking schedule is booked through the summer until my due date. I will continue to update my blog with my summer cookie projects. I hope you'll continue to follow my cookie adventures until I'm back to work! Thank you to all my wonderful customers - I look forward to baking for you when I return from my 'cookie-in-the-oven' leave!!

Hi! I'm so excited to be finally posting on my blog!! After a hard drive crash, my computer was out of commish for almost a month. No email, no blogging, nothing. It's been a little tough. I'm still getting files and programs loaded back onto my computer. Not fun! On the bright side, this crash was a good lesson in unplugging from technology!

The timing of the crash wasn't all that bad either. I had a ton of things to do before the baby arrives. We did lots of house projects, worked on the baby's nursery (which I'm hoping to share in an upcoming blog post since it turned out sort of cute!), stocking up on groceries and toiletries, cleaning and assembling baby gear, doing lots of lots of laundry, and most importantly - I have had time to spend with my 3-year-old and Topher. We have been enjoying our weekends together before the chaos of a newborn hits the house!

Did I mention I made a few great dinners and popped them in my freezer? What fun! We have Mac & Cheese, Veggie Lasagna, Pulled Chicken BBQ, Chili, Meatloaf, Doggie Stew, Tajin, and Sheppard's Pie. Plus, I baked 3 loaves of zucchini bread for the freezer. I wanted something tasty on hand for our visitors after the baby arrives.

And I did manage to do a few cookies during my tech hiatus. I will definitely be sharing the photos from those projects. They turned out as well as cookies can when you have a HUGE belly bumping the table every time you try to pipe a straight line. 

So since I was out of computer land for a little while, I have a few cookie projects that I never got to share. Like this 'Gone Fishin' set I made for a special 50th birthday. I especially enjoyed this collection because I had the freedom to design the cookies any way I wanted. 

Here are my sketches of a few of the cookies.

This is the fly fishing lure sketch. As you can see above, I did not like my fist attempt and scratched it out.

Here are the individual photos of the cookies from this collection.

The red tackle box. I used my treasure chest cutter for this cookie. It has a little more negative space than my normal cookies do, but I really liked how this cookie finished.

A pink and purple lure.

And a blue and green lure.

I looked at a million pictures of fly fishing lures and they are gorgeous. I loved all their colors and feathers. When flooding the cookie, I knew I wasn't going to outline the body of the lure, so I took my time flooding each section. I flooded the middle section first, let it dry, and then went back and flooded the outer two sections.

This kept the sections distinct.

A fishing themed birthday cake. The cake was fun to make. I flooded the light blue area with the clouds first. Then I added the waves, using a toothpick to pull the wave up over the light blue area in a nice point. Once the background was dry, I added the bead borders, fishing pole, and text.

A Gone Fishin' sign. The sign was also created in layers. I had to flood the background first and let it completely dry. Then I outlined and flooded the sign. Once that was dry, I went back and added the grass and text on the sign. The process was a little lengthy, but I like the dimension of this cookie.

And of course some fish!! In the past I have painted on silver and gold accents using luster dust. But on these fish I used a 'spray can icing color' from Michaels, part of the Duff Goldman line (Ace of Cakes guy). It was a lot faster and applied evenly. But it was very messy and almost impossible to apple to a small specific area. I guess it's meant more for cakes than cookies. I think I'll stick to my luster dust in the future.

I also made a few small goldfish. They were much easier since I just needed to spray one color.

Here is the collection all together.

I actually made 6 dozen cookies for the party...and the birthday boy loved them!

I am hoping to post again before I have the baby. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity! It's nice to be blogging again. I've missed it! Thanks for reading and have a sweet day!

Anne