Good Things by David

Happy New Year to you.  I want to thank everyone who takes the time to read the blog, learn from it, and get inspired by it. Many of you who send me photos and share stories, inspire me in turn to try something new or approach a project differently. I love seeing people get creative with their baking, cooking, decorating and collecting. Keep it up! Let's all make 2019 a fantastic year for ourselves and for our loved ones.  Cheers!

To change things up a bit for my niece and nephews this Christmas, I settled on making them a set of woodland sugar cookies in the shapes of adorable animals and figures.  Among these shapes was a set of gigantic gingerbread boy and girl cookie cutters, which I found several years ago at a consignment shop. These particular cookie cutters were beautifully made in the United States by the coppersmiths at Copper Gifts ,  in Missouri.  Although mine are vintage, you can find a similar set that is currently being made (click on the link provided)! Woodland Sugar Cookies Several of the cookie cutters, such as the adorable hedgehog, the mushroom and deer, came from my good friend Janet back when she was cleaning her cookie cutter pantry.  She loves everything woodland, and is known for imbuing her home every single Christmas with things that one finds in nature. With a nod to my friend and how she decorates for the holiday, I decided do something similar with su...

For local clients and customers I decided to go a little retro with their Christmas sugar cookies this season.  Snow globes filled with beautiful evergreen trees covered in icy sugar crystals, jadeite-colored Christmas trees strewn with garlands that look like tinsel, Christmas stockings that are stenciled with snowflakes, and a few Victorian ornaments that are shiny and bright with colorful drageés, are just some examples of what I made. Let it be known that not only do the cookies look pretty, but they taste the way a good sugar cookie ought to.  It doesn't matter how nicely a cookie is decorated or how elaborate the artwork is, the cookie base and the royal icing has to be delicious.  Being in the business of making custom cookies for special clients and local customers here in Pennsylvania, my ultimate taste testers and critics are the kids.   Well, I think it's safe to say that this year's retro Christmas cookies are going to go down in the history ...

For those who are celebrating Hanukkah, the eight day holiday is a great time to eat traditional sweets of all kinds, but I personally think it's even better if you get to share a few of them with those who are dear to you.  This year, if you have a moment, bake and ice sugar cookies in the classic shapes of Hanukkah that we all know and love. Two dear friends of mine recently asked me if I would make special Hanukkah cookies for their family and friends.   I immediately set to work on assembling my tasty sugar cookie dough as a base, and several batches of that good royal icing recipe I created many years ago. Hanukkah cookie cutters were then taken out, and I began one of my favorite tasks of all time.  Baking! During the Festival of Lights, one candle on a menorah is lit for every night of the observance of this holiday.  Eight nights and eight days require a menorah with eight candles, plus an additional candle (in the middle of the candelabra) used fo...

In the latter part of the nineties (late twentieth century), the L.E. Smith Glass Company of Pennsylvania manufactured a special shade of glass, called caramel glass, for the Martha by Mail catalog.  This particular color was used on a limited number of glass items that were already being produced for Martha Stewart Living, back when their exclusive catalog was in business.  The production run for this shade of glass lasted for less than a handful of years. Many of us collectors tend to classify this particular opaque glass as 'slag glass', while others label it chocolate glass, brown glass, and of course, caramel glass or caramel slag glass.  Make a note of it while searching for pieces online.  Not everyone is going to call it caramel glass. Slag glass is characterized by swirls or whorls of cream or white glass mixed in with the dominant color portion of the dish.  Antique slag glass was actually made by combining molten metal ores with molten colored g...

Kitty cats, jack-o-lanterns and candy corn are absolute essentials for Halloween.  If you cleverly combine their images, you can make the most adorable sugar cookies for your Halloween party and for neighborhood trick-or-treaters this year.  Trust me when I say that the little ghouls and goblins are going to want one of each of these cookies in their loot pails.  I first came across the inspiration for my sugar cookies while visiting the local Paper Source store.  The images at the store were part of a charming Halloween paper kit, and as you can imagine, my mind immediately turned them into cookies.  I wasted no time in searching for the right cookie cutters for this endeavor from my holiday collection. Using the Sugar & Spice Cookie Dough Recipe (use the blog search engine for the recipe), I made several batches of it and several batches of my royal icing (search for it on the blog). The plastic candy corn cookie cutter can be found...