Hey there....

I'm back!

:O)

Well, I haven't really gone anywhere... oh! hang on, I lie. I went home to Australia and Malaysia for a few weeks earlier this year to visit some family. Make that lots of family!!!

My baby cousin got married *tear* and it was a beautiful beautiful gorgeous wedding.

Congrats cuzzies! *love*

Cookievonster updates... hmmmm.

Where to start.

Let me see.

Lets start with the newest addition to the family - Churchill.

In the peak of my crazy holiday baking, my Cuisinart mixer croaked on me, and it was only a year old! I had worked the poor baby to death! People, take note. Cuisinart mixer, pretty awesome. Has a fabulous big 7 quart bowl, functional shape and size. Whips and mixes better than any Kitchenaid mixer. I know this because when the Cuisinart broke down, I had to use 2 Kitchenaid mixers to do what the one Cuisinart did.

Problem with Cuisinart, it runs on an electronic circut board, its digital, and that's where it loses out to Kitchenaid. Since all functions on a Kitchenaid are manual, its straight forward, strong and durable. Anyway... the circut board on my mixer blew and I was without a mixer at the worst time possible. I had to order parts to fix it, bla bla bla, it was going to take 2 months, bla bla bla...

OMG! ARGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! was all I could think of while I freaked out.

Working with 2 little mixers was a huge juggle and by the end of the 2nd day without my Cuisinart, I was ready to explode, condemn the world, bite anybody's head off, kick in doors and walls, scream till my lungs collapsed,

i.e. be as dramatic as I could be :OP

Then... Christmas came early.

While I was battling with the 2 mixers, stressing out and making doughs in tiny batches, D came home and yelled, "make space on your counter for me now, now!" and runs back out.

I thought to myself... Oh no he didn't!!!!!

Was he absolutely insane, and I must say, brave, to dare ask me to clear my table while I was in the mist of baking.

The next thing I saw were these 3 guys struggling like mad and lugging in this monster of a machine.

Its....its....

BEAUTIFUL!

It is huge, but silent. Strong yet agile and graceful. Its simply impressive and for any home baker,

its plain Awesomeness.

It has such character I had to name it.

So everybody, meet the giant of home mixers who has taken up a quarter of my island.

This - is - Churchill.

D and the whole family, mainly Dad *big hugs*,

had chipped in to get me Churchill for Christmas to save my 'behind'!

BEST

CHRISTMAS

PRESENT

EVER!!!!!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

oxoxoxooxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxooxox

As for the Cuisinart. I got it fixed, works perfectly now, better than new too. And its sitting nicely in storage. I kinda feel bad for it, but oh well... I can't move Churchill out of the way even if I wanted to anyway :OP

Sorry Cuisinart, Churchill's here to stay.

Double stacked of cuteness...

I made my very first Iced Shortbread cookie for little Emma's 6th birthday party.
They wanted something different as party favours and asked if I could come up with something like the iced sugar cookies.
This project started my new hobby of hunting down and collecting cookie cutters, Yay! for me, but not so much for my little house that is already jammed packed with full of 'stuff' :OP
I'd love to try making my own too, if only I knew how to, but that will have to be added onto my long list of 'things to try'.
My cookie cutter hunt lead me to the idea of a double layer cookie, and I found a fab set of cutters to do just that. It was a set of one large 5" flower for the base and little individual petals and a bumble bee for the top layer. All in all, it was a total of 9 cookies in one. Quite the assembly job it was, but well worth the end result.

Anyway..... I don't know about you, but a sugar cookie tastes like sugared cardboard to me, more like a biscuit, and I'm not a big fan of biscuits.
I love cookies! So I could not make myself bake any biscuit-like sugar cookies. I just couldn't do it! I need to love what I make so I had to find a recipe that I loved to suit this very purpose. After spending a week of trying out recipes of different sugar cookies, I just dropped the whole idea of it and started from scratch.

What did I love? Well, I do love the melt in your mouth Shortbread cookie, so that was what I started with. I had to adjust my Shortbread recipe to make it suitable for cutting and icing, and still kept all the elements of a delicious buttery rich melt in your mouth Shortbread cookie.

A week and 8 attempts later, I got a recipe that I was truly happy with. It held its shape well, was buttery, with a hint of lemon n vanilla, wasn't dry, and tasted perfect! By this time however, everyone who lived near me was over loaded with shortbread cookies :OP

The assembly line for this cookie was long.... and although it was only an order for 15 cookies, it took forever! Let me put it this way, I had to individually cut, bake, ice and stack each of the 15 big flowers + 15 bumble bees + 105 petals = a lot of cookies!
After a lot more practice, thank God I work a lot faster these days, because those cookies took what felt like an eternity.
But it was FUN! Loved every second of it and I especially loved the Bumble Bees! I even made some extra bumble bees for the fun of it because they were just too cute :O)

So here's my Lemon Vanilla Shortbread Iced cookies