Cream Cheese Mints: Part Deux

For those who don't know, Sampler Village accepts samples of handmade items each month and compiles them into a box. Each box has a theme, based on seasons and holidays. Traci from Sampler Village contacted me in early December, after seeing my Snowflake mints:

Same recipe as my posting from "The Great Cream Cheese Mint-A-Thon", but I did vary the flavors: The yellow were Butter Pecan, the green were Peppermint, and the pink were Cinnamon. They had a Baby Shower Vibe when I cut them out, so I added a little royal icing detail so they sorta resembled snowflakes.

Traci was interested in adding something like this to the January box, which has a Valentine's Day theme. I thought it might be awesome to get a little advertising out there, so I came up with these:

These are cinnamon flavored, and have little red sparkly sugar crystals. They're kinda fun, right? I did 50 little packages of these to be sent out in Traci's Sampler Village Boxes for January. If you're interested, they'll be available on January 21, you can find them at http://www.samplervillage.etsy.com/.

Tell 'em Amy sentcha.

Let's move past our New Year's Resolutions...and watch some football.

I come from a very athletic family. Sadly, the athletic gene sort of skipped me: I played volleyball in high school, and dabbled in golf a little (mostly for the beer, though), but was never really super-athletic like my cousins.

Still, though, I have a sincere love of all sports. I love to watch basketball, football, baseball. I scream at the TV, jump up and down, whip a towel...just as if I were there. Co-workers comment often that Illini basketball games are more fun to watch with me. I love the attributes that people gain from sports: health, friendship, competition, sportsmanship, working as part of a team, etc. I probably should have went into Physical Education or something.

Nevertheless, I can always find a way to collide my passions into one:

Exhibit A: The football helmet:

We may be a little town, but in the fall, our little town goes big football crazy. My cousin Clay plays, and I made them these, which match the team's helmet, to celebrate his first home game of the year.

He got some footballs to go with them:

So after these, I am ready for the NFL. Except that I would have to pay $100,000 licensing fee. Then a royalty. Uhhhh...a little out of my price range.

One more note on these cutout cookies: I moved an amazing volume of cutout cookies over the holidays...all thanks to my Mom and Dad. We discovered they have a knack for rolling and cutting out cookies. I would give them a list, 3 batches of cookie dough and the cutters, they would have a little assembly line going...Dad was the roller/cutter, Mom was the baker/cooler. They would go through the 3 lbs of cookie dough in like an hour. They loved it, and were always like, "OK, we're done! Give us more!" Thanks, Mom and Dad...there's no way I would have survived the Christmas Cookie Extravaganzas this year without you guys.

Maybe we can do that kind of volume around the Super Bowl (if I can find 100K for the fees!)