Doctor Who Cookies

I am a huge fan of anything scifi/fantasy...so it's pretty much a given that I'm a huge Doctor Who fan.  I posted this photo a few months ago in a post about a few events I did.  I did these for fun do I didn't really do a tutorial but I did do vine's for them!  So I figured I would post my vine's which while not the same as a tutorial, do show my decorating process and give a little bit of an explanation on how planning and executing more complicated cookies works.

Summer Fun Cookies Decorating Tutorial

I love making decorative cookies that are bright and fun, and summer is the perfect time to make them!  If you remember my ocean cookies you may remember the starfish, sailboats, and seashells, but this time I wanted to amp up the color even more.  What more perfect cookies to do to celebrate summer than brightly colored beach themed cookies?

Summer Beach Cookies

Decorating level: Easy-Medium
Concept, design, and execution by Jesika Rose

• Gluten Free Sugar Dough Recipe or my gluten free chocolate sugar dough
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" round cookie cutter, starfish cutter, sailboat cutter, and seashell cutter
• 6 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Three-Six #2 round tips
• Three #3 round tips
• Food Safe Markers
• Toothpicks
• Gel food coloring:
• Lemon Yellow
• Sky Blue
• Deep Pink or Soft Pink with a drop of Fuschia

How to: Make Character Cookies

A month ago was my Grandma's 90th birthday, and to celebrate my family all went to dinner.  I made these cookies to go on the place settings when everyone was seated.  My Grandma loves Tweety so we went with him for the cookies.  Decorating cookies is what I specialize in...especially character cookies.  Once you learn how to do a basic character it's easy to take that idea and use it as a template for any other characters you do.  Especially animation characters with black outlines.  This tutorial is to show you how to do a basic character.  The more you decorate the more you'll learn how to break down a design and in what order to decorate it.  This tutorial will show you how to decorate Tweety, with general instructions that will apply to any cartoon character!

Tweety Bird Cookies

Decorating level: Medium
Concept and execution by Jesika Rose, Tweety Bird is a creation of Bob Clampett, Looney Tunes, and Warner Brothers.  I claim no ownership of his design and these cookies were for personal use only.

• Gluten Free Chocolate Sugar Dough Recipe or the gluten free regular sugar dough recipe of your choice.  I'll be posting a "regular" gluten free dough recipe in the next few weeks =)
• Royal Icing Recipe
• 4" Circle Cutter
• 7 Decorating bags, couplers, tips, and rubber bands
• Two #3 round tips
• Four #2 round tips
• Four #1 round tips
• Toothpicks 
• Edible Ink Food Safe Markers
• Gel food coloring:
• Sky Blue
• Lemon Yellow
• Orange
• Black

Ocean Themed Decorated Sugar Cookies

A few weeks back I decided to have some fun after work and make some ocean themed sugar cookies.  I hadn't decorated in a while and missed it...so I picked up some new cookie cutters along with some marine ones I already have and decorated cookies of my other great passion, marine animals and the ocean.  I had so much fun doing this cookies.  Especially the octopus and the whale which I designed myself on a round cookie (I wasn't liking the whale cutters I found and I didn't have an octopus).

Butterfly and Circles Decorating Tutorials

 This weekend I helped out at Compost for Brooklyn's Block Party.  I donated packs of decorated gluten free sugar cookie butterflies with gluten free chocolate chip cookies for their bake sale.  I also helped out at the booth then lead a decorating demo for the kids at the block party and let them have their go at decorating!  Afterwards I came home and made video tutorials for decorating butterflies.

Decorating using "pulling" is such a fun way to decorate.  I think every butterfly I made was different.  It's such a great way to experiment with what you can do with royal icing!  It's a process that requires speed though, so I couldn't really do photo tutorials so I tried my go at videos!  Unfortunately I didn't put my camera quality on high, so the video isn't HD (by any means) but I think you can still see everything fine and hopefully I explain it well too.  So the first video is the butterflies above, and also these "monarch" style butterflies:

I also did a second video for decorating circles with pulls to make borders and starbursts.

Butterflies for the Community

This Sunday (June 3rd), I'll be donating 24 packs of gluten free cookies with one chocolate chip cookie and one of these butterflies to Compost for Brooklyn.  It's a local community project about ecological restoration and reducing and recycling waste with their compost program.

They're having a block party this Sunday:

If you're in the area you can stop by, buy some delicious baked goods, enjoy live music, and even get a free tree!  Also, I'll be doing a decorating demonstration! I'll show how to make these butterflies, how to make monarch style butterflies, and basic techniques in pulling. 

If you can't make it out, Justin will be taping the demo and I'll post it as my first video tutorial! This is a technique that requires immediate action once you've flooded the cookie so it's difficult to take step by step photos. 

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Decorating Tutorial: Tutus and Flowers

For my little cousin Samantha's 3rd birthday, I wanted to make Tutu cookies for her because she loves ballet.  When I cut and baked all the tutus I needed I still had a lot of extra dough, so I cut the rest into flowers.  Now, I was limited for time, so these are not gluten free, but I'm sure you could find plenty of recipes for gluten free dough on the web.  I haven't perfected it yet with my own flour, but at work we just substitute Bob's All Purpose Gluten Free Flour in our regular recipe and it works great!

But back to the point, this is Jesicakes first decorating tutorial!!  I'll show you how to make these flowers and those tutus.  And the great thing about decorating, is once you learn principles like layering, you can apply them to make any cookie you want.

Royal Icing

Recipe by Martha Stewart

Ingredients

- 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- 5 Tbsp meringue powder or 2 large egg whites
- 1/2 cup of room temperature water
- 1-2 tsp lemon juice

In the bowl of a mixer with a paddle attachment.

Add the water and lemon juice and using the paddle mix the water in enough so it is mostly saturated.

Turn on the mixer on low until it is fully saturated.  Then turn the mixer to medium high and beat for about 8 minutes.  The icing should hold it's peaks when you turn off the mixer and raise the paddle.

I find it easier to thin icing than to thicken it, so I'd make the base batch thick.

Transfer to a sealed plastic container to keep the icing in while mixing the colors.  The icing will dry out and harden if you leave it exposed.
 

Icings Colors and Decorating

-Pink Gel Food Dye

-Yellow Gel Food Dye

-3 #2 round tips

-1 #13 star tip

-4 couplers and 4 coupler rings

-4 pastry bags

-Loose Icings: Light Pink, Dark Pink-Thick Icings: Dark Pink, White, Yellow
-Opal or White sanding sugar and a paper plate (optional)

My eRecipe Page

Like my dessert recipes?  Well on top of baking, I love to cook in general.  So while I want to keep this blog strictly desserts/sweets (with maybe the occasional indulgent breakfast item like my gluten free pancakes), for all other meals of the day you can visit my eRecipe page.  As long as things are still going as planned, I'll also be Chef of the Week there the last week of October (I'll post more when it gets closer and I know more).  So far I have my desserts you've seen here, but also a recipe Gluten Free Spinach, Escarole, and Goat Cheese Lasagna, and a recipe for Sauteed Swiss Chard and Pomegranate.  I'll be posting a lot more on there in the next few weeks.  While desserts are what I love most and how I make my living, cooking everything from breakfast to dinner is also my passion.

Hunker Down for the Hurricane

So, while I'm not freaking out like crazy buying the grocery store out of a year's supply of bottled water and batteries, it's common sense to not plan on going out at all during a hurricane.  Later tomorrow or Sunday I'll be posting a recipe for Anything Imaginable Oatmeal Loaf.  It's a gluten free loaf base recipe that has room for add ins of whatever you desire.  I've done everything from Banana, Coconut, Chocolate Chips, and Walnuts to Apples, Carrots, Cranberries, and Walnuts.  What you do need is a stocked pantry.  Being a baker, my pantry is always stocked with gluten free baking necessities...especially for those last minute chocolate chip cookies urges.  So here's a quick break down on some gluten free alternatives always in my kitchen:

-Brown Rice Flour - Dense and a bit grainy, but Bob's Red Mill version is actually pretty fine compared to others. When recipes don't call for a lot of flour (like my brownies) and it's silly to do a blend, I almost always will use just brown rice flour.

-Sweet Rice Flour - A thickener but also adds the sweet flavor of rice versus the more nutty almost flavor of brown rice flour.

-Oat Flour - (Obviously) adds a great oat flavor, and when mixed with other flours layers in really nicely.  My favorite recipe I notice it in is my chocolate chip cookies.  There's just a subtle undertone of oat flavor.

-Tapioca Flour - Helps in holding together the batter.  Adds that spring to baked good that tells you they're down.  It also helps add a nice crispness and golden brown color...which if you've tried a gluten free recipe without it you may have noticed that gluten free flours don't tend to brown.

-Sorghum Flour (I haven't used it yet but I'm excited to try it. It's pretty high in protein without the very earthy taste and smell of something like Garbanzo flour)

-Xanthan Gum - Necessary to add viscosity to gluten free batters.  Otherwise, anything baked free of a mold (like cookies) will not hold their shape and spread out too much while they bake

-Gluten Free Baking Powder - Baking Powder has some kind of starch in it. It can be cornstarch, potato starch or wheat starch...the latter of which will make it contain gluten.  So make sure you check the ingredients in it or make sure it says "Gluten Free."  I use Davis.

-Gluten Free Vanilla - Vanilla contains alcohol...some use a grain alcohol.  So again, make sure your vanilla says "gluten free."  I use Kirkland's Vanilla (the Costco brand...it's gluten free, tastes good, and you get a pretty gigantic bottle for very cheap compared to the gluten free vanilla in the supermarket)

Of course, my kitchen always has chocolate of some kind, sugar, salt, baking soda, unsalted butter, milk of some kind (usually almond because I actually love the flavor it adds, but just make sure no one has any allergies!), cinnamon, eggs, and so on....all the usuals for any pantry and fridge used in all kinds of baking recipes.  I also plan on making some homemade gluten free Graham Crackers this weekend...half of which I'm pulverizing to make Gluten Free S'mores Cookies.  So between that and possibly making some hurricane cocktails, I think I have a good plan to survive Irene.

Welcome!

I have had the most wildly different aspirations for my life and my career.  From curator of a major metropolitan museum, to painter, to marine biologist I changed my mind almost every week.  One thing I always loved was baking.  Throughout college I'd bake for parties and my friends would tell me that I should start my own bakery.  I'd modestly laugh it off...baking was just a hobby...something I enjoyed.  And over the past two years I started thinking to myself why should baking just be a hobby?  So after graduating college I landed a job at Cookie Girl Bake Shop where I honed my baking skills and also learned to decorate specialty sugar cookies and cakes.  While all of this was happening, I was advised to go gluten free because I have a medical condition called fibromyalgia. So now the question is how could I keep baking if I couldn't eat anything I made?  That's when I began researching and discovering all the ways I could make gluten free desserts that taste just as great (if not better) than those with gluten.  One of the things that has always driven me towards baking is that desserts are always a positive thing.  No matter how bad of a day I'm having, I can have a chocolate chip cookie and all my troubles melt away if only for that one moment.  So now I'm out on a mission to develop recipes, further learn to decorate, and turn baking into a career.

On this blog, you can expect to find recipes I try and even some I've developed myself.  I'll also be posting photos of my decorating from work and home.  I'll post reviews of new products I try on my journey to develop the best gluten free versions of desserts.