The Great Wappelville Baking Show!

On the day of our Anniversary, it is time to show another annual tradition in Wappelville, and that is making the Christmas cookies!!

It took on an added dimension after catching the Great British Baking Show... and it all begins with making the doughs...

With the Gingerbread and Nutmeg cookies baked and cooling, it was time to make the all important frosting!

To make her Peanut butter Blossoms, Cathy unwraps lots of Hershey kisses...

On to the frosting!  It is hard to believe that most of these food colorings were used for the fondant frosting of our wedding cake.

Cathy discovered some new candy decorations for the cookies in various colors, so I was looking forward to trying them out!

All the colors are now in bags, and it is time to decorate those cookies.

Here we have the first few trays, including the Christmas Shark.  Those new candy bits proved to be just as helpful as we thought, and opened up a lot of new options for decorating.

It just would not be Christmas without trains... all aboard the Wappelville Express!

It wouldn't be a happy Holiday without a few tanks and soldiers.  And some Goblin helpers for Santa!

Holiday Spirit really soars with the Dauntless SBD and the Demon Angel.

Trunko, Jeero and the rest of the stuffed animals would be very disappointed if we did not have a few cookies to represent them!

Yup, we made a few cookies.

Just a few.  I think it was about 11 pm by the time we were done.

Sherman is delirious to see his own cookie!  Don't eat that now...

So it is time to say Merry Christmas, and wish a Happy Anniversary to my wife Cathy.  We have been on the miniatures painting journey from the very beginning, and it has been a great sleigh ride!  I love you very much!

Happy Holidays!

Part two of the Holiday Series will show the process of making the icing for those Christmas cookies.

As you saw in part one, we decided to make regular cookie shapes out of the nutmeg dough, which was normally turned into log shapes.  Since it tended to keep it shape much better than the gingerbread version, we gave it a try.

Sugar and butter whipped together with vigor and a fork created the base.  Into this mix would go the food coloring.

We set up some containers for the mixing process.  Amazingly enough, we are still using the containers of food coloring which we used on our wedding cake frosting 16 years ago!

Depending on how much of the coloring you place in the mix, you will get a more or less intense result.  I went pretty heavy with this forest green, since we had a lot of Christmas tree shapes!

Since we felt like there was a little more time this year, and there were two of us, a few new colors were added.  The Cyan blue and the forest green were added, and we would be surprised at how many fun options that would provide.

We also set up more of an assembly line.  It's not just for miniatures!

As we had in the past, we used baggies with a small hole cut in one side.

Cathy would do a bunch of cookies with one color, leaving space for me to place a color that I might have in my hand, such as the lighter green or yellow.

The forest green provided an unexpected bonus... we could make Christmas Goblins!

It can take a little while to get used to painting with a baggy of frosting, but it does work.  Having lots of little candy pieces and flakey bits was very helpful.  I tend to use those a little more each year.

Sometimes as you are plowing through all those cookies, you forget about those little stars and tiny candies.

The D20 shape was not easy to do, but with the frosting warmed up from lots of handling, it "thinned" it down like a glaze on a series 7 brush.

Having multiples of the same shapes meant that you could try out more color combos.  I also like to cover more of the cookie, instead of just doing outlines.

Here's another peek at the growing stack!  I will try to post as many pictures as I can, although they were kinda packed away before we took pictures of the overall batches on the sheets.

Lots of happy Holiday cheer!  These should keep Santa happy...

Tis The Season

Hey folks!  It's that time of year, and it means that I can finally post the Holiday Series!

These are not quite miniatures, and it's not quite painting, but it is still quite fun.

Yes, Christmas Cookies!  Gingerbread and Nutmeg cookies to be more precise.

Of course it all starts with a good dough.  Using the ancient mixer to stir away at that batter...

The Nutmeg dough is much easier to shape than the gingerbread dough, and it does not fluff up quite as much.  This means the shape you cut should be guaranteed to look like what you intended!

Now for the really messy part.  Or one of the messy parts.  Spreading out the flour on the table to make sure those freshly cut shapes don't stick!  This is a two person job, and a rotation of fresh chilled dough from the refrigerator and back to the table.

Uppy is very interested in the cookies, as all of the Ugly Dolls are.  We had to watch them closely...

As each sheet baked, we got a chance to try out the new stackable drying racks.  These were a huge boon, and made the process a lot easier than past years, as space is always at a premium.

Cleaning all the dough and flour out of these is not gonna be easy, but they are many of our favorite shapes.

This image gives you an idea of the difference, as you can clearly see the expansion of the gingerbread vs the lighter nutmeg dough.

This was Cathy's new experiment!  She saw this online, and had to try it.  We did some research, and gathered some materials.  It was decided that the nutmeg dough would be better, since it would keep the impressions much better without that expansion.

The weathering process!  Cathy brushed on some of the cocoa powder, wiping away the excess.  Sounds a little familiar, eh?

In tomorrow's episode, we get to see some "painting", including the creation of the paints !!

Stay tuned as Santa's Workshop kicks into full Holiday gear!!