Making Swirly Leaf Cookies for Thanksgiving

I know it’s a little late in the season for autumn leaf cookies. The snow has been flying here in Minnesota and the fall leaves are long gone. However, I recently treated myself to some new cookie cutters and Thanksgiving is my last chance to use them before it’s all Santa and snowflakes. I recently saw this swirly-looking cookie frosting and thought I’d try it myself. It turned out to be pretty easy to do, and so I thought I would share it with you.

The Cookies. I used The Best Rolled Sugar Cookies from Allrecipes, which is an excellent recipe. I rolled the dough about 1/4” thick and cut out various leaf shapes and pumpkins. I ordered my cookie cutters from The Cookie Cutter Shop. They have a very nice selection. Most of my cookie cutters are in the 3” to 4” range.

The Icing. I used Sugar Cookie Icing from Allrecipes. I had used this icing before on my Ladybug Cookies with great success, so I knew it would work beautifully for this project. It is easy to work with and with the corn syrup in it, it develops a lovely smooth surface. I mixed up the icing and divided it up to make different colors. Here was my snag. The food colorings that I have made super-bright colors, not the more muted dark colors of autumn. I’m sure there are better food colorings out there than what I have (I swear I’ve had this same box of food colors for at least 10 years), but I didn’t want to go out and find them. I brained-stormed and decided to try adding a little cocoa powder to each color. It worked! The cocoa powder muddled the colors, making them just right for autumn.

Ack! Day-glow colors!

Ahhh….a little cocoa powder results in subdued autumn colors……

The Technique. First, frost your cookie with a base color. Then immediately dab dots of another color on with a toothpick.

Once you have your two colors applied, start swirling.

Just drag a toothpick lightly across the dots to make any pattern your desire.

You can make veins of leaves.

You can even make hearts by simply dragging the toothpick through the dot once.

Beautiful!

This not only works with fall leaves, but you can also used it to decorate Holiday cookies, Valentine’s Day cookies, Easter cookies, you name it!

The only problem is, they are almost to pretty to eat…..

Have fun and Happy Thanksgiving!

I wasn’t born a perfectionist. No, I learned it somewhere along the way. I’m pretty sure I know when it started. My family was turned upside down when I was about 10 years old. My mom had corrective surgery on her back and came out paralyzed from the chest down. It sent our lives into complete chaos. My mom was learning how to live without the use of her legs. We were learning how to live without the mom we had always known. The one who was there when we came home from school, now at a rehab center learning how to use a wheelchair. The one that cleaned the house and made our dinners, now not able to reach the sink or stove. Now we came home to an empty house, relied on neighbors for dinners, friends to clean the house. I was the oldest, so I had to learn how look out for my sister, cook, and clean. My dad still had to work while all this was happening, so the house became cluttered and cleaning it was an uphill battle, but I still tried. Thinking if I could just get some order to this house, I could get some order in our lives.

Finally things settled down and we got used to our new life. We built a handicapped accessible house. That sense of wanting to get some order in my life stayed with me however, and it grew. One summer after my freshman year of high school I decided my life would be a lot better if I lost weight. I was overweight and did need to lose weight and I was successful. I lost 50 pounds in about 7 months. That’s when I started to really control my eating. I would eat the same thing day in and day out, oatmeal for breakfast, apple and yogurt for lunch, plain chicken breast and veggies for dinner. It was very boring and I never let myself indulge. If I did indulge, I would exercise like crazy to burn it off. As I’m typing this, it’s sounding a lot like an eating disorder, isn’t it? But it wasn’t, I never got dangerously thin. I was always a healthy weight, but the power I got from controlling my weight and eating was intoxicating.

Soon the perfectionism travelled to my studies and I started to get straight A’s. If I could control my weight I could surely control my grades too. I was becoming a perfect person. Perfect body, perfect grades. But why? I didn’t know then, but I know now that it was so I had control over my life. It certainly had nothing to do with happiness, because I was not happy. This lasted through high school and college. Then it started to unravel. Thankfully.

There are several points in my life that have been keys to my learning how not to be perfect. The first was meeting my husband. He taught me how to loosen up a little. I started focusing less on school and working out and more on actually enjoying life. Our time was spent trying to avoid roommates and homework so we could go make out and dream about our future together. My future didn’t involve being skinny and perfect, it just involved being with him. My grades started to drop and guess what? I survived. I got my first C in a class and I still graduated with distinction.

I started easing up on perfectionism even more when I was diagnosed with cancer. When that happens, you really just have to let go and put yourself in the doctors’ hands. It actually felt nice to not be the one to worry for once. One of my doctors even told me to let them do all the worrying. You can’t believe how good that felt to hear. Having five surgeries in 6 years meant that I wasn’t able to keep up with my exercising and I did gain some weight back and guess what? I survived. I’m not skinny anymore, but it’s ok. Now I feel healthy, like I’m being nice to my body, not abusing it, trying to fit it into some stereotype. Now I’m just me. I REALLY enjoy food now, but have kept the sensibilities of moderation and nutrition that I learned in my perfectionist days. I exercise now for health and energy, not just to maintain my weight.

Changing careers has also had a big impact on me. Going from a job where I twiddled my thumbs in front of a computer, to one where I’m dashing about with too much to do in not enough time has taught me that sometimes it’s just “good enough.” It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.

I still struggle everyday with my perfectionist tendencies. I do like order and tidiness since I found that it helps me be more efficient, but there is a limit now. Sometimes the house only gets cleaned once a month and we have piles of bills and papers on the kitchen counter and I live with it. Sometimes I don’t get everything done at work or I make mistakes and I live with it. And guess what? I’m happy. I’m happy to say, “I’m not perfect!”

The internet is an interesting place. You can show only your good side. You can show your mean side. You can even make up a completely different personality. You can be one person on one site and another person on another site. You can choose what you put out there. My life hasn’t been all peaches and cream. I can be bitter and angry, sometimes snarky. It’s a part of who I am and sometimes I show it. It’s tempting to only show my good side and be all nice, but I’m not all nice. Sometimes I say stupid things and the introverted perfectionist in me has a really hard time letting it go, but I'm learning.

It’s really tempting for me to only post my “perfect” photos and leave out the ones I’m less than thrilled with. I decided that I would put them out there anyways, just as a way to say that I’m not perfect and I’m not pretending to be. For instance, I wanted to delete this photo of Slow Cooker Chicken Stroganoff, but I decided not to. It shows who I was at the time I took it - someone who hadn’t wielded a camera in a creative way in years. Look how far I’ve come.

Original photo of chicken stroganoff

A much better photo of Chicken Stroganoff

Sometimes the food, the lighting, the angle, I don’t know – even the air, come together serendipitously and create the most beautiful picture. One that I’m really proud of. Other times I just can’t get it right. I have a picture in my mind how it’s going to be, but it just doesn’t translate through the camera. Sometimes I’m tired and grumpy and I say, “Here, I made the friggin’ dish, now here’s a friggin’ picture.” Sometimes I’m just not inspired and I have no idea how to take a picture of a dish. Sometimes the food is just plain ugly. Either way, I put it out there. It’s just me. I’m a cook, I’m a photographer, but I'm not perfect.

Ick, I should have taken this one in natural light, but guess what? There is no natural light at night!

Serendipity