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!

snowflake cookies

To go along with the winter Tokidoki unicorn cake that I made for my daughter's 6th birthday in my last post, I also made these snowflake cookies as the favors. She's still really into Frozen right now, so she is currently loving anything with snowflakes! Fitting, for a winter birthday!

I started with my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), which I rolled out to about 1/8-inch thick, and then used a snowflake-shaped cookie cutter to cut out my shapes. Then I baked them at 350F for 10-12 minutes until golden brown.

For the royal icing (recipe also in my book!), I only needed two colors - white, and light blue! So I outlined each cookie with stiff white icing (using a disposable pastry bag fitted with a small round tip), and then filled them in with runny white icing.

After the cookies had dried for several hours (I prefer overnight), I used stiff light blue icing (tinted with Americolor sky blue) to pipe a snowflake design on each cookie (also using a small round tip). I did a pretty common snowflake design, but you can do whatever design you like!

They came out pretty nice! And they were a good size to give out as cookie favors.

I ended up wrapping each one in a cellophane bag tied with raffia, which keeps them nice and fresh for 1-2 weeks.

I think these would also be great as cupcake toppers, or even as decorations for a "Frozen" themed cake! They would even look great on place settings at a Christmas table, similar to how I used cookies on place settings in this post!

Enjoy!

snowflake cutout apple pie for christmas

In addition to the cookie christmas tree and reindeer cookies that I made this past Christmas, I also made this apple pie for dessert! It's been a recent tradition of mine to make apple pie for Christmas, including this Christmas wreath apple pie, or this Christmas Tree apple pie (there's even a Hello Kitty apple pie in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), so this year I decided to do snowflake cutouts for my pie!

I started with a batch of my favorite pie crust (recipe in my book!), divided it in half, and rolled out my bottom crust to fit into the bottom of my 9-inch pie dish. Then I poured in my apple filling (apples, sugar, flour, cinnamon, cloves, salt, and a pinch of salt), and then used a snowflake cookie cutter to make a snowflake decorated top crust!

After a quick egg wash and a sprinkling with sanding sugar, I popped it into a 415F oven for 15 minutes, and then lowered it to 350F for 45-50 minutes, until the crust had become golden brown.

I'm already thinking of more shapes to make for future Christmases to come! 

Enjoy!

rudolph the reindeer cookies

For my daughter's class Christmas party last month, I decided to make these cute reindeer cookies, based on a design I had seen at Bubble and Sweet. I loved the color of the turquoise and white reindeer with the red nose accent, but I decided to do the reverse and have a snowy white reindeer with turquoise spots and red nose instead. Luckily, I had recently been given a beautiful reindeer cookie cutter from Cookie Cutter Kingdom, so I was all set! (Thanks Cookie Cutter Kingdom!)

I started with my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book), which I rolled out to 1/8 inch thick, cut out shapes, and then baked at 350F for 10-12 minutes until the edges of the cookies had turned golden.

Then I whipped up a batch of my favorite royal icing (recipe also in my book!), used white stiff icing to outline my reindeer cookies, and then used white runny icing to fill them in. (The stiff icing outline acts as a border, so that the runny icing doesn't drip off the edges of your cookie!) For the turquoise spots on the reindeer's back, I mixed a bit of royal blue gel-based food coloring into stiff icing, and piped little dots onto the reindeers while the white icing was still wet. Then I let the cookie dry for several hours (or overnight).

Once the icing was dry, I piped little Rudolph noses with stiff red icing and a small round tip.

I just love the color combination of white, turquoise, and red!

Also, since we were hosting Christmas this year, I had an idea to have a little reindeer cookie on each place setting. So I left several cookies completely white with a red nose, and then painted the antlers gold inspired by these gilded reindeer cookies from Sweetapolita! To make the gold "paint", I used edible gold dust mixed with clear vanilla extract, similar to how I painted the gold star cookie that topped my Christmas tree cookie tower in my previous post. 

And here's how they looked on each place setting.

The little gilded reindeers went perfectly with my bay leaf garland, white candles, and gold flatware!

Hope you and your family had a very Merry Christmas!

cookie tree for christmas

I've always loved the look of macaron trees, they are just so pretty! But since my daughter is allergic to nuts, I tend to only make macarons for other people. And although I have made nut-free macarons before, I don't want her to get used to the idea of eating macarons in case she starts to think that regular macarons are okay for her to eat! So for Christmas this year, instead of making a macaron tree, I made one out of sugar cookies!

For the cookies, I used my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), and used a small round cookie cutter that was approximately the same size as macarons. Then I baked them at 350F for about 10 minutes, until the cookie edges were golden.

I also made sure to cut out several star-shaped cookies, that would go on the top of the tree.



For the royal icing (recipe also in my book!), I tinted it leaf green, and used stiff icing to outline each cookie.

Then I flooded each one with runny icing, and let it dry overnight.

I also iced the star cookies with white icing and same approach - stiff icing to outline the cookie, and runny icing to fill each cookie.

Once the icing was dry, I mixed edible gold dust with clear vanilla extract, and then used a food-safe brush to paint the stars gold.

When I was ready to assemble my cookie tree, I covered a styrofoam cone with waxed paper, and then used royal icing "glue" to carefully attach my cookies.

After several rows though, my cookies started to fall off (eeek!) from the weight of the other cookies, so I used a thick silk ribbon to keep the rows in place until the royal icing "glue" had time to dry.

The final touch was the gold star on the top of the tree. I used two of the gold star cookies, and sandwiched them around a bamboo skewer, using royal icing to "glue" them together.

A perfect centerpiece for the table!

Hope you had a Merry Christmas!!!

christmas wreath shingled apple pie

One of my favorite Christmas decorations is a beautiful Christmas wreath. Just the sight of wreaths hanging on all the doors in the neighborhood gives such a warm and welcoming feeling. In the past I've made Christmas wreath cupcakes, Christmas wreath mousse cake, and Christmas wreath cookies, so why not make a Christmas wreath apple pie?

Last year I made this Christmas tree apple pie, so this time I did the same thing except with little circle pie crust cutouts instead of Christmas tree shapes. It starts with a homemade all-butter pie crust, filled with sliced apples that are tossed with sugar, flour, cinnamon, ground cloves, and a pinch of salt. (You can actually find the entire pie recipe in my new book, The Hello Kitty Baking book - just look for the page on making Hello Kitty Apple Pie!)

With half of my pie crust dough, I rolled it out and fitted it into the bottom of my pie pan. Then I filled it with my spiced apple filling, before rolling out the second half of my pie crust and cutting out little scalloped circle shapes with a small cookie cutter. Then I neatly arranged a row of circle cutouts along the perimeter of my pie...

... followed by a second row of cutouts...

... and finally a third row to complete my wreath. Be sure to leave a little hole in the middle of the wreath to let the steam escape from the pie!

I baked the pie at 425F for 15 minutes, then lowered the heat to 350F for another 45-50 minutes (and by then the entire house smelled like delicious apple pie!)

The pie turned out perfect - the crust was tender yet flakey and crispy, and the apples were perfectly cooked with just the right amount of sugar and spice!

While the pie didn't resemble a Christmas wreath as much as I had hoped it would, I thought it was still super cute, and could actually be made for any occasion. I'll definitely be making this again, maybe next time I'll just called it "scalloped apple pie"! :)