Christmas Cookies and Holiday Hearts

My cookies at the photo station...

Greetings friends! I had to stop by and visit with you again today - I wanted to share how my holiday spirits were lifted over the weekend...

My dear friend Leslie and I took a Christmas cookie decorating class and we had the best time. We had signed up for this class almost two months ago and had been anxiously awaiting the date. We took the class from a local small business owner that teaches cookie decorating classes in her home. Cindy's Cookie Co. is located in Olathe, KS...and if you are in the area, you should check her out! We arrived at 1:00 PM on Saturday afternoon for the 2-hour class. There were ten total students and she had everything set-up so nicely! We each had our own workstation with six fresh baked sugar cookies, several bags of royal icing and all the tools needed to complete our decorating. This was my first time working with royal icing and I did pretty good for a first attempt - in fact, everyone did...we had a great teacher. She gave an educational lecture on each of the tools and supplies, her tips and tricks, and where to purchase materials...we had a practice sheet to work with the icing before starting our cookies...plus she had a bottle of water and a snack at each workstation. 

The teacher's sample cookies...

My first cookies decorated with royal icing!

Once we decorated all six cookies, she had shopping set up, a station where we learned to tie bows for our cookie boxes, photo albums of her work for inspiration...even a staged photo area where we each placed our cookies for a photo op. She took pictures of each of us with our cookies...and had a gift bag for us when we departed that included a shiny new cookie cutter! It was a super fun afternoon and I am already looking forward to taking another class with her in the future. Best of all, the cookies were delicious. Goody, goody, yum, yum, yum!