Triathlon Cookies

In this household my bakery goes hand in hand with my involvement in triathlon and running. At first that might sound strange, but before you wonder for too long about how in the world does triathlon connect with baked goods, I’ll tell you. For the majority of us triathletes (yes, even us injured ones) we love our food! And rightfully so. After enduring brick workouts, long rides, and tempo runs where athletes have to follow very strict nutrition plans to have successful workouts, we deserve a little reward at the end of the day! It is this “reward” that often comes in the form of sweets! … well for me anyways.

Earlier in my bakery days I created a triathlon cake that showed off my love for designing triathlon themed goods. Now I’m back at it again, only this time you can ship these these triathlon goods!

Can you say “Triathlon Nom”??

These particular cookies were ordered by a super supportive wife who used this gift/ design as a way to say Happy Birthday to her husband while also taking the opportunity to honor all of the hard work and dedication he has shown in his preparations for his first M-dot 70.3! A great idea if I may say so myself!

On that note, good luck to everyone who is reading and has a big race, long run, or training ride this weekend. Remember, there is always cookies at the end, so just keep going!

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Lilly Pulitzer Inspired Cookies

Last week an old friend from college got in touch about surprising a family member with “Happy Wedding Week” cookies. I had never heard of “Wedding Week” presents but I thought that it was a very nice idea, and having experience a stressful wedding week myself, I could appreciate sending a bride to be a little love!

Now you might be wondering how (or in my case who) does Lilly Pulitzer come into all of this? Well our Bride to Be is a huge fan of anything Lilly Pulitzer and loves pink! These were basically my instructions for the cookies. I had full creative privileges outside of these ideas! NICE! Now, I suppose I should figure out who Lilly is!

Turns out Lilly Pulitzer is a designer with an appetite for bright colors and large flowery prints! Here are a few samples of the different patterns I was considering.There were several disaster cookies in the making with these detailed prints, but don’t worry those “bad” cookies didn’t go to waste!

Finally I came to really like this one pattern that is featured on this springs dress line! I knew the Bride was a pink kinda gal so I just inverted and slightly changed the color scheme to satisfy the cookie request while keeping true to the pattern!

What do you think? Was I close? I also created a few green cookies just to break up the sea of pink. I don’t think I’ll get into too much trouble for that!

In the end I was really pleased with how the cookie design turned out! I hope the Bride can take a few moments through out the week and enjoy them too! And incase she’s reading, Happy Wedding week, enjoy every moment of it!

Thanks for reading!

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Cookie Fun!

Do you remember the days back when you were in grade school and the entire back page of your notebook as covered in scribbles, doodles, and sketches? Drifting off to whatever daydream distracts you while your pen has a mind of it’s own? Well the following cookies are pretty much my “adult” version of that. (No, not “Adult” as X-rated, but adult as in I’m no longer living my life by a school bell schedule).

See what I mean?

Guess I was still day dreaming about the beach?!?!

I don’t know what kind of day dream this was because I am not a super fan of facial hair, but all the same I think the mustaches came out kind of cute! These cookies I think will be golden in the Fall when my guy friends all decide to participate in Movember! I’m thinking these will be a seller!

And finally these were the culprit tools that led to my goofing around! Sometimes I just end up with extra cookies and extra icing! I surely can’t let good cookies OR good icing go to waste! So I doodled! And I doodled some more… finally the icing ran out.

This was a fun cookie day! A way more enjoyable afternoon than doing my taxes!!

Thanks for stopping by!

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A Cupcake Tasting

I was given a challenge!

A loyal reader of the blog wrote to me and explained that her soon to be “40-something year old friend” was guilty of decapitating every cupcake that she ever eats. In other words, (as my sister would describe) this Birthday girl has a cupcake eating condition whereby she prefers a higher icing to cupcake ratio.

This reader wanted to know if I could create a batch of cupcake tops (like muffin tops) with various icings piled on top for her friend as a birthday gift.

I accepted the challenge!

Since there were three ladies getting together for the reveal of cupcake icings, I decided to take it a step further! You know the other two ladies weren’t going to love sitting there watching their friend devour the icings and listen to her description of the various tastes and textures; nor were they going to ask the birthday girl to share her favorites either. So I went ahead and made a batch for each of the friends so they could all bite into the different flavors and combinations at the same time and do this “Mmmmmmmmmm”.

Surely, if you’ve done the math you’ll notice that there are sets of four on the table, and I’ve mentioned three ladies. That leaves one extra of each flavor combination. Well, The Boss was kind enough to be my “creative editor” for the day and photographed every single set of cupcakes for me. That saved me a LOT of time; I paid him in treats for his labor!

Here’s a closer look at the line up!

Mexican Chocolate- Spiced Chocolate Buttercream/ Chocolate Cake

Birthday Cake- Birthday Cake Icing / Funfetti Cake

Smores- Toasted Marshmallow & Ganache center / Graham Cake

Bertie’s Lemonade- Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting / Vanilla Cake

Cherry Blossom- Cherry Buttercream / Cherry Chip

Tiramisu- Espresso Cream Cheese Frosting / Vanilla Cake

Peppermint Patty- Peppermint Buttercream & Ganache / Chocolate Cake

The Classic- Chocolate Buttercream / Vanilla Cake

Boston Cream- Ganache with Cream Filling / Vanilla

Peanut Butter Nom- Peanut Buttercream & Ganache / Chocolate Cake

**MIA** The “Vanilla Dream” and “Salted Carmel” were the last icings made, and of course I was running a little tight on time and they unfortunately did not get individual “fashion shots”.

Then they were all packaged up including a tasting menu and a bow!

So what do you think, how did I do? Is this a box of treats up might like to receive for your birthday? More importantly I have to very important questions for you…

1) What would you be willing to pay for a dozen customized cupcakes (or just tops) with your choice of cake and icing combination?? Complete with a menu and bow!

2) Reflecting on the flavors I created for these ladies I think I did a good job varying the icing flavor profiles  and textures. What flavor would YOU have liked seen featured in a cupcake tasting?

That’s all for now folks, thanks for stopping by!

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Happy valentine’s Day

Isn’t it crazy how on Holidays or special occasions you realize how fast time has gone by?? Honestly, weren’t we just shopping for Christmas presents and picking out cute outfits for New Year’s Eve? Where did the month of January go? It sure is hard to believe that we are now half way through February!

For many reasons the month of February has not gone as I had hoped. I’m staring at you Home Depot! What should have been a quick 2 day install of our kitchen floors, actually took closer to 2 weeks! They had ordered the wrong color for our ceramic tiles and figured that out AFTER they had finished demolishing the entire original kitchen floor! While waiting for the new special order tiles to arrive, the entirety of our kitchen was sitting in our living room (yes, stove as well! Sniff). Some people might have rejoiced in having an excuse to avoid cooking and order take out for two weeks, but for me, this was torture! What was I suppose to do in terms of “baking” without a kitchen?

Finally, my kitchen has been reinstalled and I was back at it again! For you on Valentine’s Day, I present a new Bertie’s Bakery Staple, a feather light, meringue based, no butter, icing! I think I shall call it Light as a Bertie’s Feather Icing! … or not, that’s kind of long.

As always the recipe is listed below. Before that, I’m posting the obligatory glamor shots of the icing!

You know you want to try it! It’s actually one of the easiest icings I’ve created to date, and yet one of the best!

*Quick note, if you haven’t checked out yesterday’s post on my new blog Re-Design, head over and leave a comment to enter my Smart Bar giveaway!

Happy Valentine’s Day, and thanks for stopping by!

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