Christmas Baking, Part one

A couple weeks ago I did a lot of cookie baking.  I packed up all my baking supplies, my cookie sheets, my bowls, my stand mixer and even my wooden spoons.  My husband and I went to my grandmas house and met up with my mom.  I wanted to do a lot of baking but I knew that our apartment was just too small for the amount of baking I had in mind.  I didn't have enough room to cool cookies and I definitely don't have enough room to store cookies.  I unfortunately didn't take pictures at the time, but don't you worry...I will.  This weekend I'm pulling some of them out of the freezer for my great-grandfather's birthday party. 

We made:

Peanut Butter Blossums

Molasses cookies

Sugar cut-out cookies, glazed

Chocolate Crinkles

Gingerbread Men, decorated

I still have a lot of baking to do.  I want to make a couple Indian sweets and some Peppermint Bark.  I also have a couple cakes and Piyush requested Dorie Greenspan's World Peace Cookies again.  They are his favorite.  If you've never made them, you must!  I'll definitely be blogging about them this weekend!

Anyway, today Piyush had a little holiday party at his office, so last night after I got home from work I had to make a cake.  I really wasn't in the mood, but he promised them all a cake and I wasn't going to let him go out and buy a cake.  That'd be blasphemous!  I told him I wasn't going to do some awesome decorating job, just something really quick and easy.  I only did 2 coats of frosting, and only let my crumb coat sit for like 10 minutes.  I usually wait quite a bit longer and do 3 coats just to make sure it's nicely coated. It took me maybe 20 minutes to actually decorate.  I wasn't all that pleased with it, but Piyush liked it though.  I was glad, because I was tired.
This is what the cake turned out like:

I drew a stocking on the top of the cake and just filled with stars.  This was exciting.  I used a #14 for the red and a #16 for the white.  I wanted the white to look fluffy.

I piped some wreaths on the side of the cake using stars.  I then made a ribbon using #104.  I need some practice making small ribbons sideways.  These were a little difficult to make look right.  but it turned out decent, I guess.  I can make big ribbons like it's no body's business though.  Those are easy as pie.  I put some little red dots on it too, for berries. 

To make the little trees, just use a #14 tip and pipe using even pressure, tapering off towards the top.  I then used a #1 tip to decorate the trees.  I was too lazy to mix up more colors, but it'd look cool if you had yellows and blues and made them look like real christmas trees.

I sprinkled the top with clear cake dust so it looked like snow and wrote Happy Holidays...and it was done!

Yay!  2 more cakes to go.  I'm so caked out. haha