Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

 George Takei alerted me to a very important date today:  JRR Tolkien's birthday!  I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings a few years ago and I have since read it several times.  It is a complete world that I can dive into and be lost in for hours.  A few months ago, I read the Hobbit for the first time, and I loved that as well.  I have a pretty horrendous commute to work and I have the books on a USB.  I really recommend listening to the audio book, the narrator is phenomenal. 

Some awesome friends of mine wanted cookies for Christmas, and one of them asked for Hobbit themed cookies.  I knew that it would be too difficult for me to capture the Hobbit characters purely through royal icing, without making them seem too cartoon-ish.  I decided to paint on the cookies instead, using paintbrushes that are reserved solely for food, Americolor Gel food colors, and GFCF cookies with royal icing piped and flooded, which I then allowed to dry for +8 hours.

I found some images I really liked and used Illyria to help me paint onto the cookies.  I painted Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, Smeagol, Gandalf the Grey, the three trolls, and the Ring.  I wanted to use color in all the cookies, but I feared I would lose detail if I added color.  Instead, I am going to bring some edible food markers for my friends to color in the cookies with.

GFCF cookies have been very frustrating for me in the past, but these were a breeze to make!  I used a box mix, vegan buttery (????? I feel like that sums up my emotion....butter-y?) sticks, rice milk, and some vanilla extract.  It rolled out like a dream on my new Roul'Pat (thanks Crystal!).  I used a pizza cutter to cut out various rectangle shapes (because I am too cheap to buy cutters) and they baked beautifully.  Usually this mix makes some crumbly cookies, but I have to say, the buttery sticks worked great!

Lilaloa recently challenged other cookie decorators to forget about color.  I hope she likes the first three cookies!