Balzer Designs

Best of 2018: Painting, Food, and More

For the next few days I'm going to be sharing a series of "best of 2018" posts:

• Best of 2018: Painting, Food, and More
• Best of 2018: Art Journal Pages
• Best of 2018: ScanNCut and Stamping
• Best of 2018: Blog Posts

To compile these posts, I've read back through an entire year's worth of blog posts and picked my personal favorites to highlight.  Enjoy!

Painting -- I really did a pathetic amount of painting this year.  I hadn't realized how few pieces I completed until I starter looking through the year's archives.  Hopefully there will more painting in 2019.  But in the meantime, enjoy these ones:

Giant Tar Paper Face

I Still Believe in America

A Landscape Painting

On the other hand, this was a banner year for decorative baking.  In the food category:

Halloween Sugar Cookies

Cupcakes for Halloween

Mini Gingerbread Houses

Screenprinted Cookies

And in the miscellaneous category:

My Modern Quilt

My Traveler's Notebook

Painted Dresser

Thanks for stopping by!  More to come!

Mini Gingerbread Houses

For this year's Christmas cookie experiment, I decided to make mini gingerbread houses.  I wanted the gingerbread to actually taste good, so I tried two different recipes that promised to result in gingerbread that was both tasty and strong enough to make a house.  The winner was this recipe from the New York Times.  I made some paper templates and used them to create the gingerbread house parts:

If I do this again, I'm investing in some cookie cutters.  This part was not fun.  

I used royal icing to hold my houses together.

And then it was time to decorate! 

I'm not going to lie.  It took me about 5.5 hours to decorate all these little houses.  Steve even decided to help out with a few!

And in the end, it was all worth it because they look great AND they taste great!

Thanks for stopping by!

Screenprinted Cookies with ScanNCut

These are beautiful custom cookies.  And you don't have to have almost any frosting skills in order to make them!  Yay!  It's easy when you have a ScanNCut.  Check out the video for the instructions:

I tested this process by making cookies with my logo and discovered that screenprinting directly onto iced cookies didn't work for me:

I was ready to scrap the process until I decided to roll out some fondant and see if it was the surface I was printing on rather than my technique.  And it was!

I used both store bought (pink) fondant and homemade marshmallow (white) fondant:

It seemed to work equally well on the two types of fondant.  Though, I did find that I personally preferred the brighter printing on a white background.  But, I think they both look great!

Here's a quick visual guide to the process:

And if you don't want to print on cookies, remember you can screenprint on almost anything!

Thanks for stopping by!  Let me know if you have ScanNCut questions!

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P.S. I am a paid spokesperson for the Brother ScanNCut.  It is a machine that I love and use.  All projects and opinions are my own.

Product Registration: https://www.brother-usa.com/registermybrother/
Brother Customer Support: https://www.brother-usa.com/support/

Cupcakes for Halloween

You know, I titled this post "Cupcakes for Halloween" but really it should be called "An Excuse to Try Russian Piping Tips."  When I was doing some research about cookie decorating, I ran into lots of super cool information about Russian Piping Tips. 

What are Russian Piping Tips?

I'm so glad you asked!

A regular piping tip has a single hole at the end.  Russian Piping Tips are kind of like Play Doh Extruders, but way fancier.  In essentials, with a single squeeze and flick you can create a frosting flower.  Watch the video:

Well, I just *had* to try it for myself.  Definitely not as super easy as the video makes it seem, but surprisingly easy nonetheless.  Without any further ado, here are my purple and black and orange and white Halloween flower cupcakes:

Some things I'm taking away from the experience:

• The two-color flowers look a lot cooler than the single color flowers.
• I used a way too complicated method of getting two colors.  Next time (and there will be a next time) I am going to use the saran wrap method in the video above.
• I was trying to keep it spooky with dark colors, but I really think these flowers would look a lot better in light pastels.
• The buttercream was so soft.  Next time I want to try an egg white based frosting recipe.  I think it will hold the shape better.  My flowers got droopy fast. 
• I piped on a hot day and I think the heat was a factor in the droopiness.  I kept having to put the piping bag in the fridge.
• Leaves are the best.  They fill all the gaps.  But I need to get better at ending them.  Mine are very ragged in many cases.
• The cupcake to frosting ratio was ridiculous.  Next time I think I would go with a cake.  The cake to frosting ratio would be better.

Overall this was a super fun experiment.  The Russian Piping Tips make it stupid simple to get great results.  This was my first attempt.  With a little bit of practice, I can imagine that you could make magic!

Happy Halloween!

Decorated Halloween Sugar Cookies

I looooove watching cookie and cake decorating videos, but over the years I've only made fancy cookies twice: Christmas Cookies & Fall Leaf Cookies.  I decided that all that video watching had to come to fruition and so I made Halloween Cookies:

I bought an inexpensive set of Halloween cookie cutters and decided to cut a few of several different shapes -- in hindsight this made things super complicated.  But, at the time, I thought variety was a great idea!  While my cookies were baking (I used this Martha Stewart recipe), I decided to plot out my icing plan.

That's a lot of colors of icing and a lot of layering -- especially for a super amateur cookie decorator.  But, I like a challenge (and the cookies were already in the oven) so I decided to plow ahead.

These are the problems I ran into along the way and how I solved them:

No black food coloring.  I only own four colors: red, blue, yellow, green.  Well, thank goodness for all those years of mixing paint.  I know how to make all kinds of blacks and settled on a blue black for these cookies.

Not enough piping tips.  I only own 2 small and 2 medium piping tips and my original plan called for 8 colors of icing (most in 2 consistencies -- piping and flooding).  I decided to eliminate some colors and then figured out a strategy for which colors had to go into the piping bags first.  It mostly worked.

I ran out of confectioner's sugar.  I thought 1 lb. would be enough.  Silly me.  So, I went on a grocery run mid-decorating.

I ran out of piping bags.  No problem. The internet told me I could use a Ziploc bag.  And so I did.

Not good at piping.  Well, nothing to fix that but practice and I can see that I was better on the later cookies.  Need to practice starting and stopping more neatly.

Challenges aside, I spent two happy days making these cookies and I love how they turned out!

And the best part about crafting with food...you can eat it!

I had so much fun making these cookies that I'm thinking about buying some more tips and making some more cookies!  Any tips from you experienced cookie decorators out there?

Thanks for stopping by!