Flowers for a friend and balls for her boys

I’ll never forget the subject line of my friend Kate’s email announcing the gender of her second and last child:  It’s Raining Men!

Seven plus years later, she’s still the lone gal among her husband, John, and their two boys. The whole family appears to live and breathe soccer: coaching, playing, card collecting, spectating. While Kate does not (yet) coach or prioritize soccer jerseys and basketball shorts as her wardrobe staples, she most enthusiastically encourages all her boys in their soccer endeavors (including John) and has allowed at least one family vacation to revolve around the game schedules of European futbol teams.

Needless to say, when it came time to “cookie thank” this wonderful family for their gifts to us, I knew I would be mixing up some black and white royal icing. I find soccer balls to be almost as tricky as character cookies to decorate. One missed angle and the whole series of hexagons are off!

So for this set, I pulled a simple coloring page of a soccer ball from the internet, sized the image on a copier to fit my standard 3 1/2 inch round cutter and used a KopyKake projector to pipe the outlines of the ball and shapes in black icing (piping consistency). Later, I filled in with white flood icing. Time consuming, but worth it!

I decided on the lily because it’s Kate’s favorite flower. For some reason, I imagined her favorite flower to be a dramatic red rose, but maybe that’s because the rose is my favorite. Maybe, when we like a person so much that we could squeeze them half to death when we see them, we assume we know all about what they like: stuff we like. But Kate surprised me with this one.  She prefers the simple, delicate lily above all other flowers. It must be a balance thing.  (;

For these flowers, I searched and searched for an image that I liked, but nothing struck me. Finally, I decided to draw the bloom myself within that same 3 1/2 inch circle. Once I was satisfied with the drawing, I traced the edges in black marker and used the KopyKake to project the image onto the cookie for piping, much like Jill FCS instructed on her fabulous guest post on Bearfoot Baker not too long ago.  Here are the links to Jill’s Facebook and Flickr pages, just in case you’re in need of some cookie nirvana.

For the petals, I used true white and off white flood icing because Kate specified white lilies as her favorite and I want Kate to always have her favorites.