Halloween Decorated Sugar Cookies

Happy Halloween, dear readers!  This post is really just to say 'hey' on our favorite spooky holiday and to share some of the stuff my little girl and I have been churning out this month for a bake sale!  It's the reason behind the belated postings this month, please forgive!

That's right, it's our old favorite holiday cookie activity, making decorated sugar cookies to celebrate the day.  Previously we've made them for Xmas, Valentine's Day and Easter, and now, finally we made them for Halloween!  We're going to share some new cookie decorating tips we tried out that are totally right-on and also share the new royal icing recipe that we're using that totally upped our cookie game!

Mini Gingerbread House

Mini gingerbread houses!  Oh what fun it is to bling out our house, hey!  Instead of making one big gingerbread house to adorn our Christmas table we decided this year to make lotsa mini gingerbread houses so that we could spread the love by gifting them to friends and family.  

These mini ginger bread houses are soooo cute, if I say so myself, and just the perfect little gift.   My little girl and I had so much fun blinging these wee houses and are totally excited for gift opening day!

Gingerbread Cookies

We discovered this gingerbread cookie dough when we made our own Gingerbread House. It makes such a wonderful ginger cookie, the flavor is just spicy enough, the cookie comes out firm enough to hold the cookie shapes well through the bake yet is still tender when you bite into it.

So nice it is that we now use the dough to whip up loads of simple gingerbread cookies to have around the house all through the holidays!  Dress the cookies up with a bit of icing and you've got a great little holiday cookie ready in no time at all!

Make Your Own Gingerbread House | Day 3 自製薑餅屋

The back of our gingerbread house

Dear readers, this is the last day!  I have to admit it, this little gingerbread house took longer to do (and a caused a bit of nervous hair tearing) than I thought it would...but what can I say, it was worth it.

There's nothing quite like a house made completely of candy and cookies, not when I was a little girl reading over and over again the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel and the little candy house they found nestled in the woods, and not even now when I'm all grown up and seen, well, lots of strange and wonderful things.  

When my little girl and I finally finished our little gingerbread house and it was sitting so pretty on our table...it was just the feeling of magic...I felt almost as if we were transported to that fairy forest, looking through the trees, eyes big with wonder, peeking at a house delightfully  and completely made of candy, with a wicked wee witch hiding inside...

Make Your Own Gingerbread House | Day 2

We're making a Hansel and Gretel inspired gingerbread house!  This is Day 2 of our step by step guide to making your own gingerbread house where we construct the gingerbread house from the gingerbread shapes baked on Day 1.  It's house construction time!

Check out our previous post Make Your Own Gingerbread House | Day 1 to find the recipe for gingerbread dough, our downloadable gingerbread house templates and step by step instructions for making and baking the dough, .  

To find out how we decorated the candy house and get tips on which candies make the best decoration please see our next post Make Your Own Gingerbread House | Day 3.

Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies

Happy Easter!  This year, instead of our usual Easter Eggs, we decided to make some Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies instead.  I love Easter Eggs, especially the ones we make from natural Easter Egg dye, but sometimes I find it rather stressful to have that many eggs to eat up.  We shouldn't really eat that many eggs because both I and my daughter are eczema prone and too many eggs means itchy.  

So we switched it up and did Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies.  And you know what?  Making and decorating these cute Easter Cookies was a super duper fun and creative project to do with my little girl, as fun or maybe even more fun than doing our usual Easter Eggs!  Plus now we get to eat all these yummilicious beautiful to look at cookies!

Happy Valentine's Day! 情人節快樂

Happy Valentine's Day from all of us at The Hong Kong Cookery!

We think there's no better way to celebrate the holiday of love than to spend some time making and decorating cookies to give as Valentines to your sweethearts and friends.  So here is my little girl's funny family of heart cookie valentines (there's Mommy and Daddy Heart, Baby Heart, Sister Heart, and Grams and Gramps Heart.)

Our Valentine to you, dear readers!   情人節快樂!

Christmas Sugar Cookies

A very very Merry Christmas to all!!  It's that wonderful time of the year again, time for the baking, decorating and eating of Christmas Sugar Cookies!  

Do you like my little girl's Santa Claus Cookie?  We're going to save this cute one to put out for Santa Claus when he comes by on Christmas Eve.  (Don't know how he's going to get into our tiny house!)  

These cookies are a great Xmas project to do with your kids cuz all kids love to draw and what better thing to draw on than a cookie you can eat!  My little girl and I had a blast making these decorated cookies in preparation for the holiday season and we figured out some great tips for the cookie decorating part that made it much, much easier for my little girl to work with the icing to decorate the cookies.

Love Cookies for Valentine's Day

Dear readers, it's Valentine's Day and we want to send you a Love Cookie!  We are really excited because this year, for the first time in 19 years, the stars have aligned to make Valentine's Day and the last day of the Chinese New Year Festival, also known as the Chinese Valentine's Day, happen on the same day!  

On this day the Chinese traditionally celebrated by gazing at the first full moon of the new year, eating Tong Yuan Rice Dumplings, and writing enticing riddle poems on glowing lanterns to attract their secret or not so secret loves.