We celebrated a very special birthday a couple of weekends back.
The Minx, would you believe, turned eight in January. No I don’t believe it either. I wonder if there are any of you around who remember her when she looked like this (oh, how innocent those blogging days were).
To celebrate we had to suffer through a party at the American Girl doll store in Seattle, followed by a birthday sleepover with eight of her closest friends and their dolls. I believe I deserve some sort of mothering Oscar.
(For those of you not in the US or in possession of an 8 year old daughter, American Girl dolls are something of a cultural phenomenon. They’re very high quality, INCREDIBLY expensive dolls – some dressed to be fictional historical characters and some from the present day – that come with every possible expensive accessory you can dream of. Even to my adult eyes, the store, with its teeny dolls’ hair salon and bistro with special chairs so the dolls can sit at the table, is faintly mind-blowing.)
Unfortunately a fancy cake came as part of the package at the store, so I was unable to emulate my birthday cake extravaganzas of yore, so I decided instead to apply myself to sugar cookies that the girls could have with milk while watching their American Girl movie. The tiny cookies are of course for the dolls.
As you can tell I’m a rather slapdash cookie icer. One day I’d love to learn how to ‘flood’ the cookies properly with icing and pipe neat intricate details on them, but this time round I made do with dipping the cookies in royal icing – the pink worked best because it was wetter and runnier – and then piped some rather wobbly outlines on them.
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I used this trusty sugar cookie recipe from the Joy of Baking, which I highly recommend, together with their royal icing recipe.
For the record here is my baby blowing out the eight candles on her cake.
And here she is with her freaky ‘Look Like Me’ doll.
I do want to improve my cookie icing skills and so to that end I’ve purchased Decorating Cookies by Bridget Edwards which looks amazing. Not that I’ve actually used it yet mind you. I find it’s always easier to buy the craft book rather than actually DO the craft. The blog which inspired the book is here.
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I’ve just been revisiting your early Seattle blog posts, remembering the first time I “met” you and the Minx. I can’t believe so much time has passed. I have very much enjoyed reading your blog and watching the Minx grow. I still laugh when I think about the time you had her birthday celebration in the middle of the night. Thank you for the entertainment and the chance to get to know you in this bloggy way. I am sure I am not the only reader you have left. I look forward (with some envious feelings) to your growing photographic expertise. I think the cookie shot on the brightly patterned background is a very good one. I need to get better at photographing table settings.
Do you have any recommendations?