A little late, but for those of you who follow our blog…we made a huge move from Costa Rica to upstate New York state the third week of March. We wanted to make sure to miss the bitter cold of winter. Turns out it was the perfect time to come. We’ve been enjoying some really nice spring days. We’ve had a few snow flurries but no accumulation (much to the children’s disappointment). They were hoping for enough to make a snowman or snow angels.

We got here just in time to see the first tulips budding and then blossoming. Tulips are one of my favorite flowers although I had never actually seen them growing, just as a cut flower.

I learned something new…that tulips open with the day and close with the night. They are sure beautiful.

The daffodils were in full bloom too.

The fruit trees (apple, plum and pear) and red maples are just starting to leaf out as well. The above image is of the plum tree buds. It is now full of leaves.

These were taken about a month ago…I’m behind on blogging…as usual.

I didn’t feel like getting out my tripod, so I just propped my camera up on some blankets on our other bed.

I might have to print and frame one of these images – I love them so much. By the way, that is the pumpkin hat I made Baby Girl and it still fits her!

I chose the above image as my entry for the contest.

When I came across Arty Mcgoo’s painted cookies that she does, I instantly thought of my mom since she is a very good artist herself. (By the way, weirdly enough, when I just checked out Arty Mcgoo’s site to link up to her, I saw that she just did a Wonderland inspired set of painted cookies! What are the odds? I promise these were not done to copy that idea). I encouraged her to try her hand at painted cookies. These were her first attempt and I am smitten. They are so wonderful. She has plans for cookie-ing more illustrations from the Lewis Carroll book but hasn’t yet.

These are all completely edible. The paint is actually thinned gel food coloring.

She made the white rabbit cookies to be a three part set.

You can see her sketch off to the side above.

Here you can see the illustration that the cheshire cat cookie was made from. The white rabbit illustration can be seen in one of the above photos on the cover of the Lewis Carroll book.

Of course the set would not be complete without some “eat me” cookies and some sparkly red hearts for good measure.

These cookies were so much fun to photograph. I am excited to see what my mom does next.

Here are some other Alice in Wonderland confections for you to check out and enjoy:

• Sweetopia’s Shortbread Cookie Recipe with Alice in Wonderland theme
• One Tough Cookie Alice in Wonderland Cake in her Gallery (Scroll down – 17th image on the far left)
• Ali Bee’s Alice in Wonderland Cookies
• Sweet Sugarbelle’s Alice in Wonderland Cookie Platter

And if you don’t feel like painting your cookies, another great option is to use edible images that you print on edible paper and put on your cookie using royal icing. I found these Alice in Wonderland wafer paper print outs available for purchase on Etsy – aren’t they cute? I haven’t tried this technique myself yet, but it seems like it is not too hard. Sweetopia has a post dedicated to how to go about applying edible ink images to your cookies on her blog.

I don’t know about your children, but mine love dinosaurs. Mrs. Sayuri has always held a fascination for them and now she and her younger brother both do.

This is a fun way for children to pretend to be dinosaurs. The idea for this came from Hubby who remembered doing it as a child. In our current backyard we have a rose bush. If you have one too, this may be something that you would like to try with your little ones. I guarantee they’ll enjoy it.

Supplies needed:

• Large thorns from a rose bush
• A piece of fresh aloe (optional)
• Enthusiastic children

First, get your thorns from your rose bush and your piece of aloe (if you have some) like so:

Now that you have your thorns…grab your piece of aloe and smear some of the goop (very technical here) onto the end of the thorn that was attached to the rose bush stalk or if you don’t have the aloe, go ahead and use the always handy spit from your mouth – it works great. Just lick and stick.

Stick it to your nose like so.

Make sure to let your little ones see themselves in a mirror and check out their cool dinosaur noses.

Then let them loose on each other and let them play dinosaurs in the back yard!

As a side note, we did this last year at the end of August so if anyone noticed – Mr. Happy Feet and Mrs. Sayuri both appear younger. As I have said before, I’m a bit behind on some of my blogging.

My mom and I made his cake together. I made the cake and she did the cookies. This is our second cake made with decorated sugar cookies.

The cake was a six inch, double layer chocolate cake with Swiss meringue buttercream (SMB) frosting and filling. The cookies are lemon sugar cookies with royal icing.

Design sources are as follows:

• Candle cookies from One Tough Cookie
• Cloud cookies from Sweet Sugarbelle
• Airplane is Hello Kitty’s airplane

Above is a back view of our cake. I didn’t push the candle cookies all the way down flush with the cake surface because I wanted them to be more visible over the plane.

The original idea was to have the plane cookie stuck to the outside of the cake, but the cookie was way too wide to fit comfortably around the six inch cake without sticking out weird… so, we changed plans and ended up propping it up with toothpicks to sit on top.

Take a look at the amazing cookie cakes that One Tough Cookie and A Dozen Eggs Bake Shoppe have done.

These delicate lace heart cookies were inspired by Haniela’s Honey Cookies and My Little Bakery’s amazing lace cookies and were my mom’s first attempt at this style. I really love how these turned out and how she made it her own.

So feminine.

I am envisioning the above stripey heart in patriotic colors for Fourth of July.

These are Lemon Vanilla Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing.

We glued it to the top of the inside of a shoe box so that it would be hanging when it emerged after the transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly (mariposa) was complete. I just used a dot of hot glue and it worked perfectly for attaching it.

Over the course of about two weeks, the chrysallis went from a beautiful aqua green with gold flecks to a dark almost black color near the end.

One morning we came downstairs and to our surprise the butterfly was drying its wings, having emerged from it’s chrysalis.

The children were enthralled with it. It took a good while for it to dry its wings. The children were so excited to be able to “hold” a butterfly.

Here you can watch a video of a monarch butterfly emerging from a pupa live.

How Awesome is our Creator? Watching this video of the metamorphasis from a monarch caterpillar to a pupa amazed me.

Here’s a link to a site offering a printable coloring sheet illustrating the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.

My mom made these dress cookies a while ago. These make me think of 50′s prom dresses.

Little Black Dresses

A beautiful little black dress cookie is featured in Peggie Porschen’s decorating book “Simply Spectacular Cakes” and was my mom’s inspiration for the cookies above (please ignore the wrinkled paper ). Although she does not have the exact same cookie cutter as used in the book, she improvised with the dress cutter that we do have for the moment. We hope to acquire this cutter soon.

I was looking for a knit hat look, but in crochet, since my knitting skills are almost zero right now. I found this free pattern for the Newborn Side-to-side Hat that gave me just the look I was wanting. I made this hat for Baby Girl a little bigger than the pattern size, increasing and making it more like a 3-6 month size.

I also chose to do a different stem and vine from what the pattern instructed. I love the way it turned out!

I made this almost five months ago and it still fits her head fine. (Can you tell I’m a bit behind on posting?) It is made from orange and green cotton worsted weight thread.

Isn’t she one of the cutest pumpkin you’ve ever seen?

Hubby just gave my site a redesign. (Thanks Hubby!) I’m loving the cheery yellow color as well as the stripes and polka dot textures.

I really like the new sidebar menu, because it should make finding things easier on my site. I finally updated my About page and What I Read. A Projects tab was added to the top menu and the Site Map is still available from the bottom menu at the very bottom of the page.

Hope you like it! Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions for how it could be better. Thank you.