Gift Baskets and Cookie Gifts

The Young Women at our church put on a small carnival to raise money to go to Girls Camp.  They needed donations for Door Prizes and also baked goods that they could sell.  I came up with the following.

 Green Butterfly tote with a cute mug, picture frame and flowers.

Pink Butterfly tote with a cute mug, picture frame and flowers.

Ice Cream Cone Sugar Cookies - perfect for summer!

Itty-Bitty Cookie Bites!

Flower Sugar Cookes on a stick

Rice Krispy Treats on a stick - cause everything tastes better on a stick right?

Local Squirrels Celebrate Earth Day!

I love to celebrate holidays.  Mostly my family and I celebrate the mainstream ones, like Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas etc.  We've never celebrated holidays such as "National Talk like a Pirate Day" or even Earth Day. 

So this past Earth Day started like any other regular day.  I packed the kids lunches and got them off to school.  Then I sat down at my computer to check my email and take a peek at Facebook.   One of my friends wrote a funny post that made me almost pee my pants laughing.  I will not mention her name - you know that whole protecting the innocent thing.  Anyway.....first a bird was trapped in her fireplace.  Then she went down to her basement to get something from the laundry room and was greeted by a squirrel.  Yes.  A squirrel.  Eating chocolate chips that it had retrieved from her food storage.   This alone may not strike you as funny, but the local animal control people came, captured the little critter and promptly  released it in my friends very own back yard.

I'll give you three guesses as to what appeared in her house the very next day.  If you guessed "A Squirrel" you would be ................wrong.  Well sorta.  After that first squirrel was captured and released, they trapped four more squirrels in their basement!!!   Following their story was almost like watching a soap opera.  Had they trapped them all?  Would more suddenly show up?  How were they getting in?  Over a period of a week they trapped them all in a live trap and released then in a park a little bit further away then their backyard.  

I'm sure this was stressful for my dear friends.  I would be stressed out waiting for squirrels to jump out at me at any moment!  I almost had a nervous breakdown when I had crickets in my house but I'm sure they will look back at this in a few years and laugh.

About a week or so after their home was squirrel free, I was shopping for some cookie cutters and I came along a particular one I thought would be perfect for my friends.

So I baked up a couple of these:

Spring Flower Appreciation Cookies

The kids and I have been having a great time decorating sugar cookies and delivering them to our family and friends for the holidays.  We made green shamrock cookies for St Patricks day.  We made sheep, carrots, bunnies and sweet yellow chicks for Easter.

We delivered some cookies to my sweet friend Lynette and her family.  Lynette is a super mom to four children, great wife, attentive daughter, active in her church and a wonderful friend.  On top of her extremely busy life, she is also in school getting her degree to be a counselor - which means she has to spend many hours counseling students and clients as part of an internship.

She recently finished her internship, and wanted to give her coworkers a little token of appreciation so she asked me if I could make up some cute little flower cookies in some fun spring colors.

 I wish I had my sister in law's photography skills............. Alas, I do not.

I packaged them up individually in little cello bags and tied them with some bright ribbon.  Lynette made some adorable little stickers to add to the front of the bag.

 I also made some bite size little flowers with the scraps of dough.   

I thought they were really cute.  

So I bagged them up and gave them to Lynette as a little bonus.

Thanks for ordering the cookies from me Lynette!