Baby Shower Cookies

    I attended a baby shower this past weekend and it was the perfect excuse to test out my new "baby shower" themed cookie cutters. I thought it would be a nice bonus to add onto the gift. Since my friend is having a boy, I thought the colors blue, green, and yellow would be fitting...I know, kinda stereotypical. Who am I kidding? It's very stereotypical! Apparently there is a general rule of thumb in society that contends men should not wear the color pink. There's nothing wrong with pink on guys, heck my hubs and boys wear it well enough. It takes a real man to wear pink right? Guys who wear it confidently are those who are totally in touch and confident with their manhood and therefore do not care what other people think. That's the way it should be but I digress....back to cookies.

    So yes, the recipe I used is from LilaLoa, her vanilla variation recipe. The only thing I did differently is that I added a teaspoon of Buttery Sweet Dough Emulsion instead of vanilla extract. This cool baking emulsion is from Loranne Oils. You can order it from several places online. I read about it in a few blogs and lately it seems like everyone is using it so I decided to try it for myself. I must admit, I was a little iffy at first just because it was quite the deviation from real vanilla extract which is pretty much a quintessential ingredient in baking but I am happy with the results. Definitely kicks the flavor of plain sugar cookies up a notch....maybe a few notches. I also added a tsp of lemon extract just because I always put it in my sugar cookies no matter what recipe I use. It just brightens everything up.
     As I mentioned before, I'm not the best artist. I was debating whether or not to actually decorate these cookies by "drawing" with the icing to make the cookies look like what they're actually supposed to be but totally chickened out at the last minute. So the brush embroidery technique-my default-was what I used. Totally cute results! After 2 days of searching for the perfect size gift box and failing, I ended up buying a cute basket, brown tissue paper and some pretty green satin ribbon and viola! A gift worthy basket of baby theme cookies!
     I also decided to try out a red velvet cookie recipe. Though the end product looked GJW, I didn't think they tasted too great. I'm sure I did something wrong somewhere along the way. My friends loved them but me, not so much. Did brush embroidery on them too and they turned out beautiful. Pictures are below.