Give Mia Cookie....and some coffee so I can keep up!: Yoga, anyone?

Whew....last week was a fun one. I baked, decorated, bagged, and tied ribbons on over 200 cookies...all in 36 hours!

Whenever I get an email with a new cookie request my heart jumps a little bit and I get really nervous...especially if it's some type of design that I've never done before. This particular email came in a few months ago....six months ago actually...and the project had been on my mind since then. A friend had emailed and asked if I could re-create a local business' logo onto a cookie for their 1-year anniversary celebration. I immediately looked up the business' facebook page to check out the logo and I thought "I can do this!" So I emailed back and we made arrangements for 6 months down the road.

what a great logo, right?? I just love it!

Many orders came and went in that six months but no one else had asked me to do a logo...so this one kept creeping into my mind and I was really nervous about it! I mean, I know how it is to be a small business and to really love your logo and see it all.the.time. so you just begin to see it differently than everyone else does. Kind of like after you write a certain word over and over again and all of sudden it just looks....weird? (For lack of a better word) Not saying that mine or anyone else's logo looks weird...I'm backing myself into a corner here, never mind.

So usually the hardest part of making these cookies is the icing color mixing. I'm sure I've complained about it in another post at some point...it's just that the color mixing is the most time-consuming and sometimes frustrating part of the whole process. Icing colors are much like interior paint. The color deepens and changes as it dries so you never quite know what the final color will be until it's dry! To get this aqua-teal color I mixed a few different greens and blues and it actually came out really pretty! I thought it was really quite close the actual logo color so that made me happy. And then I thought....this is going way too smoothly...the actual decorating is going to be the problem area here...I just know it.

Now when it comes to decorating, here is one of my super-top-secret hints. Never practice by drawing what you envision on paper. In the beginning of this business I used to draw out every design and practice practice practice what I was going to attempt on the cookie. I quickly learned that (for me, at least) this was the WRONG thing to do. Icing is a completely different medium than a pen or pencil and their is no way that you will get the same effects and details from icing that you can from ink. I would drive myself almost crazy trying to match my cookie to my drawing and get really mad when I couldn't do it. So my current rule is...just go! Just grab the icing bag and start decorating. I try not to think about it too much and that's when I get the best results! Thinking back on some of the early orders where I scrutinized over every little detail and tried to get it as perfect as a picture makes me really mad. It makes the cookie look over-worked and messy in my eyes. I should have just found a better way to convert the design to an "icing-friendly" picture and went with that instead. But...there's no going back! I've learned from my mistakes...that's for sure!

Back to Yoga...so I just started on cookie numero uno and it went pretty well. I had the yoga company's logo on my iphone screen so I would reference it every so often and then just keep decorating. Apparently there is such a thing called a Kopy-Kake (or something along those lines) that projects an image onto a cookie or cake and then you can trace it. Just so everyone is aware....I do not own this $300 piece of equipment...so there was no tracing involved. It seriously went so smoothly that I couldn't even believe it. I had about 25 extra blank cookies on hand for what I thought would be all of my "mess-ups" and you know how many I used? NONE. I breezed through the order and just LOVED the final product. I was so excited to give them to my customer and for her to give them to the yoga studio. I was just imagining if someone created something like that with my logo on it...how excited and truly touched I would be. When you have a business with your own logo....it's just a really special thing :)