Mother's Day Gift

Posted by Nicole Carney on May 10, 2012 in Gift Ideas, Handprint / Footprint Crafts, Mother's Day, Plants and Gardening, Spring Crafts and Activities | 0 comments

I am so fortunate to share such an incredible friendship and bond with my mom, and I’m very grateful and proud to have her as my boys’ nana. Every Mother’s Day I try to give my mom a little note that expresses how much she means to me, accompanied with a pot of flowers. This year, in addition to my usual gift, I thought it would be fun to create an edible bouquet from the boys, and some memory stones for her garden.

Cookie bouquet

I was inspired to create this cookie bouquet from a recipe I found here. They are appropriately called Play Dough Cookies because it feels like you’re actually playing with Play-Doh, rather than making cookies, which made this extra fun (and a bit confusing) for M! It seems like I’m constantly reminding him to NOT eat the Play-Doh… and now we’re baking it so nana can eat it? Talk about mixed messages! A couple of tips: 1. make sure to use food colour gels so you get rich colours and 2. dip your bamboo skewer in egg-whites, before sticking it inside of the cookie, to help secure them in place. I chose to make only two colours of dough: red/pink for roses and green for leaves.

Here’s what you’ll need to make your cookie bouquet:

Bamboo skewers, a block of florist foam, florist tape (or green paint), tissue paper, scrap-booking or wrapping paper, tape (double sided tape will make it look neater), an empty tissue box, ribbon, and coloured cookie dough.

Divide the red/pink dough into smaller balls and roll them into snakes (you don’t want to make them too big, or else your cookies may be too heavy).

This is the part where it’s easy to forget you are actually making cookies. M had so much fun creating snakes it was hard to convince him to move on to the next step!

Roll the snake into a pinwheel, then dip the pointed tip of a bamboo skewer into egg-whites before inserting it into the bottom of the cookie (I snipped my skewers in half because I thought they looked better short). Place your ‘roses’ onto a cookie sheet layered with parchment paper for easy clean-up.

Mold leaves from the green cookie dough. I used one of the bamboo skewers to imprint the veins onto the leaf.

While the cookies are cooling, cut the top off of your tissue box and wrap it in pretty paper.

Place the florist foam inside of the tissue box

Either wrap the bottom of the bamboo skewer in florist tape, or paint the ends with green paint (if using paint, make sure to leave a good finger space between the paint and the cookie so no one ends up eating the paint!)

Arrange the rest of your ‘roses’ and ‘leaves’ onto the florist foam. Add green tissue paper and ribbon (make sure to cover the naked part of the bamboo skewer)

AND YOU’RE DONE!

OH!
One last thing! Make sure to place the finished product out of reach from sweet-toothed kiddos! Otherwise you’ll come into the kitchen and find what I did; my little one chowing down on one of the cookies!!! Well, at least now I know they’re tasty 😉

Memory Stones

So for this project, I totally cheated and just bought a kit from Michael’s (hey, they were on sale- 40% off!), but I know nana will love them because she’s a sucker for handprints like I am!

After doing M’s handprints, I quickly discovered how messy this can be, so I made sure to strip B down ahead of time! No clothes = a very happy B!

You only have approx. 2min to design your stone, so you have to work FAST! This can be quite challenging with 2 little ones; in other words, I had NO time to snap pictures!