Always, Katie: Sweet Springtime!

I have been a baking FIEND lately! Thanks in large part to Pinterest, I have all these tasty ideas rolling around in my head... happily, in the past couple of weeks, some of those ideas have been rolling around in my belly instead!

Tomorrow is Administrative Professionals' Day, and I had been wanting to do something kinda nice for the administrative assistant for Ethan's department. She's been a real sweetheart to Ethan and to me, and does a magnificent job holding the department together. First thing I learned as a substitute teacher: if I don't know, and the teacher next door doesn't know, ask Mrs. Mills (the main office secretary)... Mrs. Mills knows EVERYTHING. What would any school, company, etc do without these people!?!? But I digress.

I was looking for flat baking sheets on the cheap for another project, and the cheapest I found came with two cookie cutters. I needed two sheets, so I got two identical sets of (legit ADORABLE) cookie cutters. I decided to bake up a big plate of sugar cookies using one set of cutters, decorate them, wrap them, and tie the unused set of cutters to the package.

As ALWAYS, I used the sugar cookie recipe from the lovely ladies at Our Best Bites. It is amazing and versatile. I used some dough in my cookie pop molds and made a half dozen "deep-dish-ish" cookies that were fluffy and flaky and buttery fabulosity... kinda like those Lofthouse cookies that have the whipped icing and sprinkles? But for the cookies I cut and iced, I rolled the dough pretty thin, and got crisp, rich buttery fabulosity. Same dough, two different styles of cookie, tastes like two different but equally fabulous recipes.

I also used their glacé icing as a jumping-off point for my icing... but I was running pretty low on powdered sugar, so I did a bit of random tweaking. It's a very tweakable recipe :c) I whipped out my Wilton gel food color... I love this stuff! I measure it with a toothpick, and the colors are SO vibrant without goofing up the consistency I worked so hard to perfect in my icing :c) I used a couple of basic decorator tips, and a nifty saran-wrap trick to reuse my disposable decorator bags...

Without further ado: