For your viewing pleasure

I'm hoping to get a chance to play around with my first attempt at cookie decorating this weekend. After my second dress fitting, that is. I figure it'll be good practice for cakes and I'm just dying to try making and using royal icing. I decided yesterday that my first project really making and giving cookies would be favors for the kiddos at the wedding. I thought maybe that would be cute, and parents would appreciate me not handing their little ones 18 inches of colored sugar on sticks. Cookies are at least a smaller treat and more forgiveable. So I plan to create a heart and wedding cookie for each little one (in our colors, of course) and wrap them up with a special thank you. We'll see how things go after my experimenting this weekend. Either way, Mr. Kingston will reap the benefits of my trial and error.

Since I'm quite obsessed with lovely cookies and cakes lately, I've collected some eye candy. These are just some pics that I feel inspired by. The first two are from flickr.com photostreams and the last two are from Bake at 350.

Obviously I'm biased, but how cute are these hand-painted paisley cookies from The Whole Cake and Caboodle? They are actually covered in fondant, but royal icing can also be a great canvas for painting on detail.



I love these flip flop cookies from Cookie Artisan for a summer party:



Mr. Kingston loves candy corn - he wants Paisley to be one (somehow) for Halloween this year. We'll see how he feels about these this Halloween.



And I love these for Halloween too. The spider web effect is created by dragging a tooth pick through circles of slighty-set royal icing out to each web tip.



Hopefully, I'll soon be posting pictures of my own creations. I also found a really cute website of fun and creative homewares and entertaining goodies. Well Dressed Home has everything from cool clocks, party games and pillows, to these morbidly cute "Gin and Titonic" ice cube molds. They have similar molds shaped like little guitars and the invaders from Atari's Space Invaders.



I'm so ready for the weekend. I've done boot camp the last two nights in a row since Monday was a holiday. Like a crazy person, I plan to go tonight and Friday morning (to make up for my missed session during the Seattle adventure). We'll see if my knees hold out. They've been sore from all the squats today. I'm off tomorrow and heading to Tucson for my second dress fitting. On Saturday night, we're going to a coworker's birthday celebration in Scottsdale. Hopefully Sunday will be a peaceful day - I've got a project to wrap up for school, and then I hope to hit up karaoke in the evening.

Have a great weekend!