Fall Leaf and Pumpkin Cookies

Remember back over the summer when I hosted an auction on my site to raise funds for Jennie and her two girls?  Well one woman, Jill, graciously bid on my cookies, and it's time for me to send them out!  I wanted to take a minute to share the cookies I made for her, but first I wanted to talk about #afundforJennie.

It seems like ages ago that everyone rallied together to raise funds for Jennie and her girls after her husband died from a sudden and unexpected heart attack.  The women at Bloggers Without Borders really rallied everyone together and collected donations for Jennie's family as well as urge other bloggers to host auctions on their sites in order to raise additional funds.  When I was telling a friend the story behind the cookies, I couldn't remember how much was actually raised for Jennie.  I went to the BWOB website and brought up the last post on #afundforJennie and almost fell out of my seat.  Do you know how much we raised?  I don't think you'd believe me if I told you, so visit the post to check it out for yourself.

How amazing is that!! I will forever be floored by what an amazing community the blogging world is.  I am looking forward to seeing what other causes BWOB will take up; I believe this organization has the potential to do some pretty incredible things.

So back to the cookies, Jill asked if I could make her some fall themed cookies and we decided on fall leaves and pumpkins.  I found my cookie cutters, made some of my vanilla bean sugar cookies and royal icing, and got to decorating.

A few weeks ago, I had stumbled across this post by SugarBelle about fall leaf sugar cookies.  They didn't look like normal decorated sugar cookies - they had a texture to them and the icing looked as if it was marbled.  She used food coloring spray paint - who knew something like that even existed!

I decided to make orange leaves, red leaves, and orange pumpkins with brown stems, leaving my color palette to a manageable 3 colors.  I bought red and orange food color spray to give the leaves some depth and figured i'd use the red on the orange cookies and the orange on the red cookies.  Well, the orange didn't come out on the red cookies (seriously, what was I thinking?), but the red on the orange cookies looked amazing!  They actually look like fall leaves, and the spray paint added some texture as well.  I hope to find some more uses for these spray cans...

Before spraying - still pretty, but the leaves are lacking something...

Enter Color Mist Food Color Spray by Wilton!  

How cool is that!  The red on the orange adds such depth to the color, and what real fall leaves are just 1 color?

The finished cookies!  Next week I'll show you how to make sure they arrive to their destinations safely...

Posted by Ali B at 3:04 PM