I'd rather be...making baby face cookies

Today there was bake sale for the March of Dimes.  I love to help raise money for causes that are near and dear to my heart.  March of Dimes focuses on helping the babies make it to full-term and researching the problems that threaten babies lives.  Having two beautiful daughters of my own, I realize what a miracle each baby is.  It really hit home last year when one of my closest friends gave birth to her daughter about 6 weeks premature.  It was a scary time while Maisyn fought for survival.  She is now a happy healthy totally sweet 14 month old.  You would never guess that she is a preemie.  But until we can reduce or eliminate premature births altogether its important to keep raising funds for important research and support.

I originally was going to make some cookies with the March of Dimes symbol on them.  However with all the cookies I've made over the last week and a half I wanted to do something simple.  Its also hard to make detailed cookies during the week.  I don't get a lot of time to decorate between working and spending time with the girls!  But I still wanted to do something that went with the baby theme.  So I decided to make baby faces.  Pretty sweet huh? 

I loved making these guys!  It was also the first time I tried using food markers.  I used the black and red markers that came in the package I got at JoAnn's.  I learned that its very important to allow your cookies to dry completely before using the markers.  I iced the cookies around 9pm last night and drew their faces at 6am this morning.  So sufficed to say I didn't let them completely dry-ops!

 I had to be very, very careful with my pressure.  The curly-ques were easy since the outer edges were dry.  The hardest features to draw were the mouths.  If I pushed even just a tad too hard it would push down and distort the mouth.  Long story short-the lesson I learned was to let the icing DRY!  Which also applies to the marker too.  I didn't let them dry before I bagged them up for the bake sale.  A few of the babies arrived a little smudged :(  But lesson learned right ;)