This is my first attempt at quilling. I cut all the strips to 1/4″ and hand rolled it since I did not have tools at the time. I used a template from the book 50 Nifty Quilled Cards by Alli Bartkowski.
Quilled Cupcake
Purple Cupcake Card
It’s been a long time since my last post. Blogging is like keeping a journal…something I have to work hard at to maintain and and at least post weekly. Life just takes over and I keep putting blogging on hold, but I will try to do better from now on.
So, to start again here is a card I made for my friend’s birthday. She loves purple (who doesn’t?) and she loves to bake so I decided to make her a cupcake card.
Cherry-Orange Thumbprints
Thumbprints are one of my favorite cookies. They’re not too soft and not too crunchy. At work we make raspberry and apricot thumbprints, probably the two most common flavors. I had neither jams on hand, but I did have a black cherry preserve so I opted for a cherry-orange flavor instead. I used a recipe I found on King Arthur Flour’s website (btw I am a HUGE KAF fan…I would love to work for them).
Recipe:
Adapted from KAF
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon grated orange zest
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 large egg
- 2 3/4 cups Unbleached All Purpose Flour
- 1/2 cup cherry jam
Directions:
1) Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two baking sheets, or line with parchment.
2) In a large bowl, beat the butter, sugar, orange zest, vanilla, and salt until very light.
3) Beat in the egg.
4) Add the flour, stirring until well blended.
5) Use a teaspoon cookie scoop (about 2 measuring teaspoons) or tablespoon cookie scoop (about 4 measuring teaspoons) of dough for each cookie. Scoop cookies onto the baking sheets, leaving space between each cookie.
6) Use your fingertip (for smaller cookies) or thumb (for larger cookies) to put an indentation into the center of each and fill with cherry filling. Note: you may want to cut the cherry pieces if your jam has really large fruit chunks. I used a star tip* and piped the cookie instead of balling them and I used a piping bag to fill the centers, but a spoon works just as well.
7) Bake the cookies for 12 to 14 minutes. Remove them from the oven. Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes to firm up, then move them to a rack to finish cooling.
Yield: 2 1/2 dozen to 5 dozen cookies, depending on size.
*If piping, use the dough immediately as it becomes too firm to pipe once it gets cold or sits for some time. Trust me…I tried.
Later on I decided to make another batch for my brother-in-law’s birthday, but did not have my large star tips so I balled them instead. Here’s what they looked like:
Playing with stamps
I always ooh and aah over stamps, but rarely ever buy them because I don’t normally use them. Joann’s had a great sale on stamps and I decided to purchase one. Two weeks later I finally got around to playing with them. I wanted to create simple hello/thinking of you cards, so I made some just to get a feel for stamping. Here is what I came up with:
Materials Used:
Cardstock – Kraft (The Paper Company)
Stamp – Peacock/hello (Michael’s); Just saying hello/Just because (TPC Studio)
Ink – Navy Blue, Black, Purple, Brown, Green, and Deep Green (Rubber Stampede)
Misc – Round corner punch (Fiskars)
That’s it for now. Tomorrow I will post some food pictures since I am still editing my sister’s birthday card and my mother’s day card.
