Do you know Jayme DeLisi? She is SUPER cute and is the talented owner of Crazy Baby Cookies! She is also expecting a baby and has been REALLY sick; so we are very grateful that she was willing to write this little post about what inspired her July cookies. (The California Midstate Fair is taking place RIGHT NOW where we live, so we think the theme she chose is perfect!) Thanks, Jayme, and best of luck with the rest of your pregnancy!
My Little July Fair
When I was asked to make a set of cookies for a secret project for CookieCon, I was definitely confused. I told my husband I was pretty sure they had the wrong number. My husband’s response? “So what? make them anyway.” So I did.
First I had to choose a month, so I chose my birthday month for the sake of making a quick decision. Then came the tough part…a theme. I decided to pick a theme that gives me the ‘good ole days’ feels. So I thought about summer in high school and settled on a memory of going to a real county fair. Not a carnival. A fair. In the actual country, with smelly cows, pigs, tractor pulls, the whole thing. I loved it. I loved the dirt. I loved the hot humid air and I loved the chaos and the smells of popcorn, pails of beer and animals in the same vicinity. So, with that spark of a memory, I started my cookies. I drew images of anything I could think of and hand cut and used cutters I already had. I ended up with a much different set of cookies than when I started drawing.
Once I baked the shapes I made icing one color at a time and just worked my way through it for several days, taking my time and layering each cookie and each color without much foresight of how they would turn out. It was a huge risk.
My pails turned to pails with flowers blooming out of them. The pigs became muddy. The apple pies became cherry pies and the unicorns became unicorn rides. The lemons and strawberries became a way to tie the colors together and brighten up the set as a whole. I used the strawberry basket cookie for popcorn instead. The Ferris wheel is made with wafer paper stars as the little seats. And on top are white fluffy clouds to represent a beautiful July summer day in the mid-west.
And of course many techniques I used were from McGoo U, such as wood grain, wafer paper, hand cutting and incorporating painting techniques for more detail.
I appreciate so much the opportunity to be able to have a set of cookies in the CookieCon Calendar and it was an absolute honor to be among some amazingly talented cookie artists.
Side note: What happened to these cookies? The day after I took the final photos we had a church potluck. I brought this entire set (around 55 cookies) and watched as people dug around searching for whichever looked the most appetizing. They were all gobbled up within the hour. I then panicked because I hadn’t checked the memory card in my camera to make sure my photos came out well. They were good enough. 🙂