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In celebration of St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to share a simple recipe that makes the prettiest Irish cookies! These will take you no more than 30 minutes and the results are stunning.

IRISH OATMEAL LACE COOKIES

Ingredients:

Makes 3 dozen

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) softened butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar - firmly packed
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Add the butter, sugar, and vanilla to a mixing bowl and mix on high until nice and creamy. You don't want butter chunks so it really helps to let the butter warm to room temperature. You can also throw the stick in the microwave for about 45 seconds on very low (power 2). It's ok if it starts to melt a little.

Mix the salt and flour directly into the same bowl, then do the same with the milk. Last, stir in the oatmeal with a spoon or fork. You should have a creamy somewhat sticky dough. Don't refrigerate the dough while you bake, you want to keep it nice and soft so it will spread.

Make teaspoon sized dough balls and place on a cookie sheet. Use a silpat or parchment paper so they don't stick. Flatten them a little bit with the back of a spoon or your palm. You need to give each cookie a couple inches to spread, so you should put 6 on each cookie sheet.

Bake for 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

Because these cookies are so thin they can overcook quickly. Check on them and pull them out when you see a nice brown ring around the outer edge. If your oven cooks at all unevenly, I recommend rotating the cookie sheet after 4 minutes. Let them cool at least 2-3 minutes before you try to remove them from the cookie sheet. They need to harden before you can move them.

Look how cool they look in the light!

You can serve them stacked on a plate...

Or in some tasty mint chocolate chip ice cream, perfect for a St. Patrick's Day celebration!

For more inspiration, take a look at all these incredible St. Patrick's Day parties on our site and our free St. Patrick's Day party printables!

Everything I read about 3D printing gets me more and more excited about the future. One day maybe we'll all get to 3D print our couches or even our cars!

I received a cookie cutter in the mail from Cookie Caster and when I realized that this is a company that makes custom cookie cutters by 3D printing them, I had to share.

You design the cookie cutter of your dreams using their site. You can upload an image you want to use, draw your cookie cutter freehand, or browse their gallery and choose from there. Then they print it out for you and send it in the mail.

A 3 inch cookie cutter costs $27 and a 4 inch cookie cutter costs $33. From browsing their gallery, I see people have created lots of animals, cartoon characters, letters, mascots, and logos.

They sent me a 3D printed star cookie cutter to try out. Here 's what it looks like.

Now if only they printed couches...

My friend, Jen Rasmussen, is what I like to call a "baker extraordinaire." I asked her if she'd share how she does some of her incredible work, and she so kindly put together this tutorial on how she makes her gorgeous snowflake sugar cookies.

Wouldn't these make a great holiday gift! In fact, I know after Jen took these photos, she wrapped hers up and gave them as a hostess gift. Lucky hostess!

MATERIALS:

• 3 inch snowflake cookie cutter (see shape below)
• Royal icing
• White Pearl Dust (Wilton)
• Squeeze bottle
• Pastry bag with #2 tip
• Small bag clip
• Toothpicks

DIRECTIONS:

Using your snowflake cookie cutter, make your snowflake sugar cookies. Here's a great sugar cookie recipe, if you need one.

Dilute ⅔ of the royal icing (here's Alton Brown's royal icing recipe, if you need one) to corn syrup consistency and put in squeeze bottle.  The other ⅓ should be thicker for piping easily.  It should fall off a spoon slowly. Add pearl dust to both for a little shimmer. Fill the pastry bag with #2 tip and secure with bag clip.  Have toothpicks handy.

Outline cookie using icing in the pastry bag.

Using the squeeze bottle, fill in the outlined area with icing.  This is called flooding. Use the tip of the squeeze bottle to spread the icing all the way to the borders. After flooding, break any air bubbles with toothpick.  Let the icing set for an hour or two.

 With piping icing, draw three straight lines from point to point on the snowflake, crossing in the center.

 Next, add snowflake embellishments as desired.

Finish with dots around the center. The cookies need to set for several hours before they can be stacked.

These definitely are gorgeous. Thanks, Jen, for sharing how you work your magic! I might try these next week with Lainey.

I've always loved Christmas cookie exchange parties. I think asking your guests to bring over their favorite batch of cookies and putting them out for everyone to share feels very "season of giving" to me.

So I asked my friend, Michelle, from Printabelle, to design a collection of free holiday cookie exchange printables for us, and in the collection, I asked her to include printables for a hot cocoa bar, too.Well, wait until you see our exclusive "Cookies & Cocoa" Christmas party printables... There is everything here you'll need to throw a festive, fun, and tasty party!

(we've now posted the recipe we used for our Christmas sugar cookies)

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD THE COLLECTION

The collection includes tented cards with editable text fields. This mean you can type in what you want them to say and print them out, like these below.

I love the 8x10 inch subway art, and how perfectly it fits in with my other decorations.

Here are the invitations. These also have editable text fields so you can personalize them any way you want.

Cute water bottle labels. I always think it's the small details that really make a difference.

Here's the mini banner and small party circles I used to add detail below my cookie display. There is also a full-size banner in the collection.

We've included recipe cards in case your guests want to write down their cookie recipes to share. Btw, be on the lookout for my all-time favorite sugar cookie recipe later this week. (updated: sugar cookie recipe is up!)

And here's the hot cocoa bar. I framed this 8x10 inch sign and put it behind the fixings.

For fixings, I put out homemade marshmallows, peppermint candies, caramels, cinnamon sticks, chocolate chips, and I accidentally left the whipped cream in the fridge. Oops.

Again, I used the tented cards with the editable text fields to fill out the labels. The collection comes with three pages of printed paper. I used one of them to line my hot cocoa bar tray.

The tented cards up close.

Here are the straw flags I attached to my red and green striped straws for a little extra flair.

And for party favors, I used the thank you cards and attached them to Wilton Christmas cookie cutters. I thought this would make a perfect take home gift.

Hope you like the collection and enjoyed my display! I seriously think I've gained five pounds putting this table together. :)

Also, there are so many items in this collection, I didn't even get a chance to use everything. In addition to what I've shown, you will also find: mini chocolate bar wrappers, large party circles, gift tags, silverware wrappers, another "Cookies and Cocoa" welcome sign, a large "Cookies and Cocoa" banner, and two extra pieces of printed paper. I told you we've got everything!

Thank you, Michelle, for such a fantastic collection. I couldn't have done this without you!!

If you use our collection for your upcoming party, please add your party to our site, I'd love to show it off!

This holiday season, let loved ones know how much you care.  Use your favorite photos to create something personalized and unique for everyone on your list.  Make it memorable.  Make it meaningful.  Make it matter.  Go to hp.com/holiday for inspiration and ideas.

Disclosure: Compensation was provided by HP via Glam Media.  The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of HP.

 

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and yesterday felt time to start making some of our favorite cold weather treats. Here's my favorite gingersnap recipe.

We like our cookies chewy at our house, and these cookies will give you that great soft mouth feel with a little crunch, plus that little warmth of ginger. I promise you will be addicted.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 teaspoon ginger
• 3/4 cup butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup granulated or sanding sugar

Directions:

Whisk together the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and ginger) and set aside.

Add the butter, brown sugar, molasses, and egg to a separate bowl, and beat with a mixer until smooth.

Add the dry ingredients while mixing on low until fully combined.

Chill the dough for about 20-30 minutes while you preheat the over to 325 degrees.

Form the dough into about 3/4" balls, flatten them slightly in the palm of your hands. Roll them in the granulated sugar and place them on a baking sheet. Leave enough space for them to spread out a bit.

Cook for 8-10 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

If you try them, please email me and let me know what you think. :)

We get so many beautiful, cool, and creative Halloween parties added to our site, I love seeing them show up! I thought I'd highlight my favorite Halloween treats to give you some ideas for your own parties. Enjoy and... yum!!

(Click on the photo to see the party the treat is from.)

Amazing, right?

For more Halloween inspiration, check out these great Halloween parties from our site. Also, see all our free Halloween printables collections here.

How great is this Valentine's Day cookie wreath...

I saw this original Christmas cookie wreath Marcela M from The Celebration Girl created, and of course I thought it was the coolest thing.

So I asked Marcela if she's be willing to put together a tutorial for a Valentine's Day cookie wreath, and she so kindly agreed. So below is Marcela's tutorial....

Thank you very much, dear Jillian, for inviting me to post this tutorial in your blog.

This cookie wreath takes a little bit of time but is very, very easy to do, and it is an original way of presenting decorated cookies.

In order to make it, I used different cutters.

The light blue cutters, including the circles with which I formed the wreath are part of a set I bought at Ikea.

I also used heart shaped cutters, that I had bought a long time ago and a bow shaped cutter.

In case you want to do this cookie wreath and, since I know how hard it is to find a variety of cookie cutters in some  countries, I have made a template of the different shapes, so that you can print them and cut.

For the wreath itself, you can draw two circles of different sizes, according to your needs, cut them and use them to make the wreath. The biggest circle I used was equal to a 9 inch pan (20 cms).

I made this wreath out of chocolate cookies, because I like how chocolate cookies taste with royal icing, but it can also be made with sugar cookies or gingerbread cookies.

Use your favourite rolled cookie dough. For the royal icing, I used this recipe from Sweetopia.

For the wreath, you will need:

• Cookie dough
• Royal icing
• Templates or cookie cutters (If you are using the templates you need to print them, cut them, place them on top of the rolled cookie dough and cut around them with a sharp knife)
• Piping bags
• Piping tips number 1 and 2.
•  I also use squeeze bottles for flooding the wreath itself, because it takes too long with a piping tip due to the big surface

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F or 150 degrees C.

Roll the cookie dough about ½ cm and cut the cookies. Place them on a baking sheet covered with baking paper and put them in the freezer to chill for about 10 minutes, so that they keep the shape.

Bake the cookies. Once they are ready, remove from the oven and let cool completely.

Transfer the wreath to the serving plate. The reason I recommend doing this is that, once decorated, it will become too heavy to transfer and it may break. It is therefore better to transfer it at this stage to make sure that it will remain intact.

Prepare the royal icing. Color it as desired and thin to the adequate consistency (I use the 20 second rule, which means that, if you draw a line with a knife on the royal icing, it takes 20 seconds for the line to disappear). Once the royal icing is ready, put it in piping bags/squeeze bottles. You are now ready to decorate!

Prepare your “decorating station.” I like to have all material at hand: cookies in cookie sheets,  a variety of sprinkles and sanding sugar, plates covered with parchment paper for applying sanding sugar, as well as the piping bags and an extra plate.

As you can see from the wreath, I decorated the cookies in different ways. I left some cookies really simple, with only one colour and no further details, and for some others I used other techniques.

I will now walk you through each of them:

For the simple cookies, I just outlined the cookie and then flooded immediately. I then shook it a bit, to even out the icing, and let it dry for 12 hours.

For the cookies with hearts, I outlined the cookie in the base colour and flooded it.

I shook the cookie, and once the icing was even, I piped dots in a different color. I then took a toothpick and traced a line going from the dot’s top to bottom…and a heart shaped appeared. I did this with all dots and then let the cookie dry for 12 hours.

For the cookies that have a single heart in the middle, I just added a heart-shaped sprinkle right after flooding.

For the cookies which have a border with sanding sugar, I first iced them as in the case of the simple cookies, and let them dry for 12 hours. After they were fully dry, I outlined them with royal icing, then immediately poured sanding sugar on top. I let the sanding sugar set (for about 30 minutes), then turned the cookie upside down to remove any extras.

You could use nonpareils instead of sprinkles using this same method.

I outlined some cookies with heart shaped sprinkles. In this case I proceeded just as in the case before, outlining the cookies after they were fully dry, and adding the sprinkles to the outlining icing.

For the wreath, I proceeded as with the simple cookies, but I let this one dry for 24 hours to make sure that the icing would not suffer any damage once placing the rest of the cookies on top of it.

After all cookies are decorated, you can start playing with them on top of the wreath, until you find a combination that pleases you. You can combine large and small cookies and stack some on top of the other, or combine a variety of small cookies.

Once you find a combination that you are happy with, glue the cookies to the wreath with royal icing. Let the icing set for 12 hours and your wreath is ready!

If you have extra cookies, you can place them in clear bags, tie them with a pretty ribbon, attach a couple of cute straws and give them as presents!

I hope that you like this tutorial and, please, do not hesitate to contact me by leaving a message in this post or contacting me at The Celebration Girl if you have any questions about the process or if you need any clarifications. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Thank you again, Marcela, for showing us how to make this incredible treat!!

Btw, here's the template. Click to enlarge.

 

I am thrilled with how our Snowflake Design Challenge turned out! If you haven't seen all 181 items, please take a look.

I feel honored that I get to show off the work of such creative people. I really do love my job and that is one of the main reasons.

Thank you to everyone who participated. I hope you get a lot of exposure for the beautiful items you've made.

And now, without further adieu, here are my top 12 favorite snowflake items, in no particular order (there were so many I loved, my husband had to play tie breaker on a few and I still had to pick 12 instead of 10)...

Glittered Snowflake Birthday Party Hat by Prop Shop Boutique

 Baby It's Cold Outside Holiday Party Invitation by loralangdesigns

Twinkling Snowflakes Holiday Card by Blush Printables

Snowflake Chocolate Lollipops by Frosted Petticoat

 Pet Photo Booth Holiday Card by Paper Heart Company

 Snowflake Cookies by Lori's Place

 Joy to the World Vintage Gift Tags by SongbirdGreetings

Holiday Eat, Drink, Be Merry Printable Collection  by TypeWink ;)

Frosted Fairy Mini Top Hat Headband by Cutie Patootie Designz

Girls Applique Winter Wonderland Snowflake Tee by Modern Frills

Winter Fun Cupcake Toppers by Party NV

Vintage Winter Wonderland Printables from Squared Party Printables

Thanks again to all of you talented people who added your items. I'm planning to do another design challenge for Valentine's Day. I hope you'll join then too.

And tomorrow, I will be doing a random drawing where one of you will win an HP Officejet 7500A Printer! Good luck!

I could browse Etsy all day! Here are some of my favorite Christmas finds so far this season...

Christmas Reindeer Paper Ornaments Printable PDF Kit by Happythought

 Gingerbread Boys and Girls by FunFavors

 Paper Gingerbread House Printable PDF by Paper & Cake

Santa Claus Fondant Cupcake Toppers by mimicafe Union

 Warning Holiday Gift Tags by Truly Noted

 Swirly Star Chocolate Lollipops by The Frosted Petticoat

Coal Hand Stamped Muslin Drawstring Bags by Bags by Jen

 Blitzen Beauty Antler Headband by Cutie Patootie Designz

Check out more wonderful Christmas items! And have you seen our free Christmas party printables yet?

 

If you see my blog posts or read my Facebook and Twitter posts, you know I'm a huge fan of creative cakes. I think if you're going to splurge on one item for your party in terms of money or time, a cake is a great way to go.

I've noticed some new cake trends (in addition to all the beautiful rainbow cakes and ruffle cakes) on our main site that I wanted to share. Take a look (and click on the photo to see what party it's from)...

The Unfrosted (or Partially Frosted) Cake

The Rustic Ruffle Cake

The Candy Coated Cake

The Cookie Wrapped Cake

The Ombre Swirl Cake

If there are any new trends that you're seeing that I'm not seeing, please let me know. I'd love to post about it.