baseball cookies for a little slugger baby shower

It's amazing to me that because of the blog, I have reconnected with several friends from high school. I mean, how cool is that?! So several month ago, another friend from high school contacted me about doing baseball cookies for a baby shower she was hosting. I had done baseball cookies before, but this time she also wanted baseball bat cookies. So thanks to my handy husband who is an awesome cookie cutter maker, he made me another custom copper cutter!

After making my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), I rolled the dough out to about 1/8" thick, used my shiny new baseball bat cutters to cut out shapes, baked them at 350F until golden brown, and then let them cool. (I did have one tray of cookies that spent a little too much time in the oven though, oops!)

Anyway, for the rest of the cookies, once cooled I used stiff brown royal icing (recipe also in my book!) to outline my bats, and then runny brown icing to fill them in.

The final touch was adding blue and red "tape" to the bats, and little lines to suggest the wood pattern in the bats.

Aren't they cute?!

For the baseball cookies, you can see more in this post of how I made them, but I basically followed the same steps - outline with stiff icing, fill with runny icing, and then add final touches with stiff icing.

I also made little baseball jersey cookies, using a onesie cookie cutter, and decorated them with piped stripes to give them a jersey look.

I think these would be great for a birthday party or a little league party as well!

Happy baby shower!!!

hello kitty giant macaron cake (cake that looks like a hello kitty macaron)

Since the first time I created my Hello Kitty macarons five years ago, I have seen them pop up all over the place, on the internet, and even in bakeries and shops. They were one of my favorite things to make, have been requested at bridal showers, and I have even made them for a wedding dessert table! It is one of my most popular blog posts, and so I had to include the recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!

Last year for my birthday, I made a cake decorated with (nut free) Hello Kitty macarons, and a few months later when I was brainstorming ideas for a Mother's Day cake, my husband suggested a different type of Hello Kitty macaron cake - one that actually looks like a Hello Kitty macaron! Genius!

Since I have an obsessive love for all coffee flavored desserts, I decided to make it a coffee chiffon cake. I baked up three 8-inch coffee chiffon layers, let them cool, and then used a Hello Kitty template (the same Hello Kitty pan sushi mold used for my Hello Kitty tiramisu cake) to cut each cake layer into a Hello Kitty shape. Then I topped each cake with a layer of coffee whipped cream ...

... and a pile of smashed oreo cookies (since I love coffee oreo ice cream SO much!).

Then I added more coffee whipped cream and smoothed the whole thing out with an offset spatula.

Next came another layer of cake, more coffee whipped cream, and more oreos.

After the final layer of cake, I covered the whole thing with coffee whipped cream, and smoothed it out as best as I could with an offset spatula.

Then I went to work making it look like a macaron! I used a large round tip to pipe a ring of pink around the sides of the cake (meant to look like the macaron filling layer), and then used an offset spatula to smooth it out. Then I used a small round tip to pipe little "dots and bubbles", meant to look like the ruffly sides of the macaron shells. 

I finished it by piping black eyes and whiskers, and a yellow nose. For the bow I of course had to pipe hearts to make up the bow, since my Hello Kitty macarons have heart sprinkles for the bow.

And there it is! A cake that looks like a giant Hello Kitty macaron!

Happy Mother's Day!

winter snowflake hello kitty birthday cupcakes

For my daughter's 6th birthday a few months ago, we went with a winter/snowflake theme, since her birthday is in December, plus she's still really into Frozen right now! We had a small gathering to celebrate, to which she invited a handful of her best friends, and I ended up making her a Tokidoki Yuki Unicorno winter birthday cake, as well as snowflake cookies for the favors. So to stick with the theme, for her Kindergarten class celebration at school, I decided to make Hello Kitty snowflake cupcakes!

I started with a moist chocolate cupcake (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book), and topped it with a cream cheese frosting (recipe also in my book!), which I tinted blue and then used a basketweave tip to pipe my basketweave design (there is also a basketweave tutorial also in my book, but you can also find other basketweave examples throughout the blog).

Then I used white frosting to pipe Hello Kitty on top of each cupcake, along with black eyes and whiskers, a yellow nose, and for each bow I used two heart-shaped confetti sprinkles. (For more examples, see links here, here, here, and here. And this link for the first and original cupcakes that I made!)

And for the final touch I added a few snowflake sprinkles! (I got mine at Target, but you can also find them here).

The cupcakes turned out moist, minty and chocolately, and not too sweet!

One of the kids even thought it was the sprinkles that tasted minty :)

Miss Melodie loved her cupcakes, and I loved watching her eat them with her classmates!

Enjoy!