It’s a little weird being old enough to be expected to bring dishes to events now. I was never much for cooking growing up, and now that I’m an adult I’ve realized I need to start bringing food to family get-togethers and other events. Luckily I’ve started to really enjoy baking. I’m still not very good at anything besides desserts, but I figured I can start with desserts and work my way up to side dishes and real foods. I like that with desserts I can have fun with the creative side of decorating and making them look festive and pretty!
I made the cupcakes above for Fourth of July to bring to a family reunion. The liners are red, white, and blue with stars and stripes. The cupcakes are strawberry, with some extra red food coloring added (for the red in red, white and blue), and vanilla icing. On top are stars cut from rolled fondant, and the sprinkles are actually strawberry Pop Rocks, so they pop in your mouth like firecrackers!
These brownies were made for a church feed. I wanted to do something different than just normal brownies because I make normal brownies all the time, and they aren’t particularly “pretty” like cupcakes and cookies are. So I decided to use powdered sugar to make cute stars on them! I used cookie cutters and sprinkled powdered sugar in the cutters, kind of like a stencil.
I also made some home-made sugar cookies shaped like stars, flags, and the letters “Happy 4th”, with red white and blue icing, but I didn’t end up getting a photo of those.