Bill and Eric and other Halloween Cookies (Tutorial!)

Here’s the tutorial on how to make these super cute Halloween cookies… or just Bill and Eric cookies.

First, I used THIS recipe to make sugar cookies:

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 cups white sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I used 2)
5 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight).

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Make sure your cookies are thick if you plan to insert a sucker stick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.

If you use sucker sticks (which allows you to do great looking cookie bouquets) carefully insert the stick before you bake.

Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.

While your cookies are cooling, you can start prepping your fondant. I had inspiration and some instruction from this fabulous cake blog recipe.

I bought rolled fondant at wal-mart. I believe it was around 5 or 6 dollars. It was in the wedding/baking aisle. While you are there, you may also want to get brown, black, and orange baking dye.

To make the vampires, you do not need to dye your fondant. Roll your fondant out like you did for the cookie dough, but roll it out as thin as possible! Cut out your fondant with the same cookie cutters:

To dye your fondant, you should probably wear gloves – especially if you are using regular food coloring. (I didn’t have any, so I slipped my hands into plastic sandwich baggies. Ghetto, yes, but it did work). But some drops of food coloring onto your glob of fondant and start mashing and kneading it until the fondant is all one color. This may make your fondant kinda sticky… I’m not sure what you are really suppose to do, but I “floured” my surface and rolling pin with powdered sugar. It makes the fondant kind of powdery, but it stops it from being an ooey-gooey mess.

Roll out your fondant very thinly and cut out with the cookie cutters.

When your cookies are cooled, make your ROYAL ICING. I used THIS recipe and kinda figured it out on my own.

Ingrediants:
Royal Icing Using Egg Whites:
2 large egg whites
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (I didn’t have lemon, so I used lime)
3 cups (330 grams) confectioners (powdered or icing) sugar, sifted

For Royal Icing with Egg Whites: In the bowl of your electric mixer (or with a hand mixer), beat the egg whites with the lemon juice. Add the sifted powdered sugar and beat on low speed until combined and smooth. The icing needs to be used immediately or transferred to an airtight container as royal icing hardens when exposed to air. Cover with plastic wrap when not in use.
I beat my eggs until they were frothy:

Then added the powdered sugar and beat them until it was combined and glossy. – I guess the right consistency is when you drizzle the frosting into the bowl and it stays on top for 5 seconds.

I used both a bag with a piping tool, and a plastic baggie with a whole in the corner – both worked fine for me. I did the white frosting first.

First I put a think coating of frosting on the back of all the fondant pieces so that they would adhere to the cookie:

I stuck them on the cookies then I did the white details.
I piped the edges of the vamp cookies and did the whites of the Frankenstein eyes.

I then mixed small separate bowls of orange (for the pumpkins), green (for the Frankenstein’s), black (for hair, eyes, and mouths), and a little bit of yellow (for Eric’s hair). I put them all in plastic baggies. I finished the details of the other cookies and colors.

My black kinda got a little funky…. Also, didn’t have brown dye, so I put brown sprinkles for Bill’s hair.

Ta-da!

True Blood and Vampire Cupcakes

Anyone else out there have a True Blood premier party?

Last night me and a group of my friends got together to watch True Blood. I made those cute vampire cupcakes which ended up not being hard to make at all. I just used boxed cake mix and the wipped frosting in a can. They were a little messy, but they looked great.

Here’s mine:

The "blood" is actually more red and not as pink.

Here's the pic of the original cupcakes, when cut in half:

If you haven’t seen the first episode yet, I would definitely recommend you watch it (or at least read all of the books!). Beware – spoilers below!

I had already seen the original pilot show, which I reviewed here. I had heard that there were some improvements, so I had higher hopes for the premier episode. The show was actually better the second time I saw it, and there were some improvements: The vampire sex scene is toned down a little bit (not enough if you ask me), and the fight scene between Sookie and the “Rats” was changed a little bit too. Oh, and the fangs look a lot better than they were before! The fangs were these tiny little sharp stick things right in the front. I'm glad they altered them!

Now for the review: I've pretty much already reviewed the show, which I linked above. I will add my two cents though. I love the Charlaine Harris books, they are probably my favorite books. I enjoyed watching a show that is based off the books, but True Blood just isn’t as good as the books (which is usually the case). HBO thought it would be a great idea to really sex it up – which I could do without. The plot follows the book pretty well, but there are definitely some differences, mostly involving the character of Tara.

While it really doesn’t matter the color or ethnicity of Tara between the books or the movie, it matters to me that Tara was turned into a crazy witch in the show. In the books she is really not aggressive – in fact she is much more passive to the point of being walked on sometimes. I can understand why she plays a much bigger role in the show than the books, but I don’t see why the need to make her so abrasive.

I still enjoyed the show though, and I am definitely planning on watching it next week. I think that True Blood will get better the more you watch and the more the plot progresses. I also wanted to mention that we all thought Charlaine Harris was hilarious when we where watching the pre-show, show. Her little comments about this and that made us all laugh.

Now that the show has premiered, Bloodcopy is adding to the plot with an interview of Sheriff Dearborne and with Bill.

Interview with the Sheriff:


Interview with the Vampire Bill:


Vampire Rights Amendment Cartoon:

Life and Stuff

This weekend I am going to work at a retreat my job is putting on… I should have fun but I am not really looking forward to being gone all weekend. At least I get Wednesday thru Friday off for my reschedule days. I’ve been stressing over the whole “what do I want to be when I grow up” question. I’m trying to figure out what grad schools I would like to go to, what programs I want to enter, and how I can do it all by staying local, working, and being married. Mostly I am concerned about what program to enter into.

Around here, at CSU or UC the options I would be interested in would be Health Psychology, Cognitive Psych, Quantitative Psych, or Forensic/behavioral psych or a masters in marriage and family counseling. I don’t think I want to do therapy anymore, research would be cool, but I don’t want to teach. Forensic and behavioral Psych joint Doctorate would be pretty interesting. Who knows.

I am looking forward to going back to get my Master and/or Ph.D, but I’m not too thrilled about the cost, the years it will take, and the overall pain in the ass it can be. There are some really interesting jobs in Psych with a Ph.D, but they are mostly available in the big cities… not exactly where I am at, and I don’t really want to teach or do therapy, but we’ll see. I’m just hoping I can find something I truly love to do and make at least a living wage on it. I don’t have to make fantastic money, but something to make a living and worth 8+ years of college would be great.

But enough about my personal life. I am still reading Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K Hamilton. It is taking me forever; partly because I have been super busy, partly because it is a lot hard to get through than her other works. This was the first Anita Blake book I read and I am surprised I enjoyed it so much I wanted to read the rest of the books.

True Blood premiers in just a little over a week! My friends and I are planning on doing a little party (check out the recipes here and here). It’s been fun getting a few of my friends interested in the same books that I have been reading.

My good friend Cassie (also a vampire book lover) turned me on to Dance of the Vampires. I would love to see the musical, but that probably won’t happen. I am waiting to get the movie in the mail. Until then, here is an interesting clip.

Two and a Half Weeks Until True Blood Premier

True Blood premiers on HBO September 7th at 9pm. I have been a big fan of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Series and look forward to the show. I've also managed to get a few friends hooked on the Sookie Stackhouse books as well!

I know that the books will be 10x better than the show - I wasn't extremely impressed with the pilot episode - which you can read about here and here. They've made some changes and I would support Charlaine Harris and just watch it for fun.

Here's the trailor:



I'm a fan of the theme song too:



In honor of the premier my friends and I plan to have a little vampire party. Here are some recipes for you to have a vampire party too!


Here's the recipe for Vampire Cupcakes: A lot of folks did these for the Twilight Premier and I think they are fantastic.


These guys are pretty cute. You can find the recipe here.

Some Drinks:



You can really use any red mixture, add some elements to the glass, and it looks great. Here is the above recipe - find another yummy drink recipe here.



You can buy these glasses here, or make your own!

Have any more ideas? Let me know!