My Moonlight Cookies: Hittin the Road (and the Beach) (June 2014)

Hooray for summer! This year, we decided to stick with our traditional option of renting a house by a lake for a week. With the kids being 4 and 2, there really is nothing better than being near a zero-entry lake and having access to lots and lots of sand. We get messy, we visit with family, and we do, well, nothing. This year, instead of heading north to Michigan, we were going earlier in the year, so we tried Kentucky Lake for the first time. The weather was much warmer, and the kids had a blast. Here are the cookies I took along for our week of vacationing (and snacking).

Let me first say, that I'm going crazy looking at the sand castle cookies. I was inspired by Make Me Cake Me's design. I knew I didn't have a lot of time to devote to these, so I was going to simplify the design a bit (as I was in the midst of packing for the trip and, let's remember, also transitioning between jobs). I just wished I had created the same ridges on the top of the castles as I did on the bottom. Driving you crazy too now, right? (or is it just me?).

Anyhow, these were pretty easy. I used a tan color to outline and flood the cookie, and then I re-outlined so I could sprinkle on some coarse sugar. I had originally tried graham cracker crumbs, but that turned out to be a mess. In the future, SemiSweet Designs has a great tutorial on using graham crackers and even using them to look like moss.

I made the pink triangle next, immediately covering it with little rainbow non-pareils. (My daughter enjoyed helping with this part.) Then I added a little white flagpole, and voila!

The beach ball also required 2-part outlining. First, I used the white piping icing to outline my ball and the different sections. I used yellow as the primary color, alternating sections, and then 3 other accent colors. I then re-outlined in white to make the colors stand out a bit more.