Pantone Color Chip Cookies! Kim Neill Bakes Up Deliciously Divine Design.

Freelance designer and illustrator Kim Neill was inspired to turn Pantone color chips into edible cookies after finding the Pantone color tins by Seletti at a nearby art supply store.


above: Kim Neill with her fabulous Pantone Chip cookies in the Pantone Tins, above right

As a holiday gift for her clients, she filled the tins with rectangular sugar cookies topped with colored icing and used an edible marker to indicate the PMS colors.




Kim even made METALLIC pantone chips. Using bottles of silver and gold edible luster dust to rush atop the icing, she created cookies in PMS Metallic Silver 877, Gold 871 and Pink 8062.



The cookies in the tins were a huge hit with her clients. The faves? Seems that the PMS 485, PMS 183 and Silver 877 were the most popular.

How to make Kim's brilliant PANTONE CHIP COOKIES:

FOR THE DOUGH:
She used Mary’s Sugar Cookie recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook. Super tasty. Recipe here.

Roll dough out between 1/4” and 1/8“ thickness. Thinner cookies keep their shape better. Cut 2” x 2.5” rectangles out of dough (using a stencil from cardboard may make it easier). Cook until lightly golden brown, keeping an eye on them as they cook because they cook quickly.

Note: If you are filling a Pantone Tin, three batches of cookies will only fill up the tin halfway. They are big tins, so to resolve this, Kim ended up lining the bottom of the tin with folded over bubble wrap to make the tin appear full.

An alternative to the tin would be to fill with Pantone mugs with the cookies, which make for a nice individual gift. Purchase the Pantone Storage Tins or the Pantone Mugs for your cookies.

FOR THE ROYAL ICING:
This is a great recipe to use because it keeps color vibrant, doesn’t fade and dries nice without being too hard. Flavor with white vanilla here if you can. Regular vanilla tends to darken the icing a bit. You might want to add a bit more milk then the recipe calls for to get the perfect spreading consistency. Recipe found here.

DECORATING THE COOKIES:
Make a big bowl of white royal icing. Start by spreading a strip of white icing across the all the cookie bottoms and let dry. Now use what’s left of your white icing to make colors.

Scoop 3-4 heaping tablespoons of icing in a tiny bowl and then color with solid food coloring. This will color 3-5 cookies. Once you are done with one color, rinse your bowl out and start again. Doing colors this way keeps the mess down and you don’t have to worry about what you just mixed drying out. Using a food dye pen, write the matching [or closest] PMS number down on the cookies.

Kim used Gourmet Food Writers, available for purchase here. To make the Metallic Chips, use a soft brush or cotton ball to burnish icing surface with gold or silver luster dust, available for purchase here.

all images and recipes courtesy of Kim Neill.

Soup For Sluts & Other Rad Ramen Noodles

The folks over at Blue Q have taken the college student's staple, instant Ramen Noodle Soup, and cleverly repackaged four different flavors with hilarious names. The genuine and yes, authentically edible, instant Asian noodle soups come in the following flavors; Soup For Sluts [spicy vegetable], Wasted & Broke [spicy beef], Hello Lazy [chicken flavored] and Din Din Fuk Chow [shrimp] and cost $2.99 each for each 3oz 85g package. Admittedly a bit more that the .39 cent versions you can find at your local market, but the reaction when someone sees them is worth the $2.60 difference.






Buy them here

Bottles Of Bud. Canna Cola Launches Five Flavored Pot-Laced Sodas.

If you've been following the news, there's been quite a bit of 'buzz', pardon the pun, about Canna Cola, a new line of THC-infused carbonated beverages for intended sale at medicinal marijuana dispensaries.



The five flavored medical marijuana soda pops; Canna Cola, Orange Kush, Sour Diesel, Grape Ape and Doc Weed are the brain child of multi-talented designer, concert photographer, political cartoonist and entrepreneur Clay Butler.




Scott Ridell of Diavolo Brands, who created the products along with Clay [they are not marketing it... that was an error in the Santa Cruz Sentinel article], says the beverage line's dosage of THC will be "somewhere between 35 to 65 milligrams" and that that "the levels of THC in his line of soft drinks will be substantially below the levels of many drinks now on the market." He likened his product to a "light beer" alongside high-proof liquors.



Although there are several THC laced sodas on the market, most are produced in small batches and lack the marketing effort of a larger brand. Kushtown Sodas and Dixie Elixirs are two examples.

Clay, a self-proclaimed "clean living guy" says he's never even smoked a cigarette, let alone marijuana.


above: Clay and some of his Soda Pot (photo for Santa Cruz Sentinel by Bill Lovejoy)

An article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel quotes Clay as saying "Marijuana sodas do exist in the marketplace. But, said Butler, none of them have the branding savvy of his product.

"You look at all the marijuana products out there, and they are so mom-and-pop, hippie-dippy, and rinky dink," he said. "If someone can put every color on the rainbow on it, they do. If they can pick the most inappropriate and unreadable fonts, they will. And there's marijuana leaves on everything. It's a horrible cliché in the industry."

Kushtown's THC-infused sodas and sauces:


Dixie Elixir changed their original marijuana leaf logos:

to a more subtle, but difficult to read, design:

Butler's epiphany was to market the THC-laced sodas "how Snapple or Coca-Cola or Minute Maid would make a marijuana beverage, if they ever chose to do it."

Thus, he used the marijuana leaf - it's an unavoidable part of the "brand DNA" of marijuana products, he said - but he designed a leaf made of bubbles (shown below), to suggest soda pop.


above: Clay Butler designed the logo and bottle designs for the Soda Pot.

Clay's graphic design skills came in handy. The bottles have fabulously fun imagery and clever names.

The sodas are intended to be priced at between $10 and $15 for each 12 oz bottle and are planned for launch in medical marijuana-friendly Colorado next month. California, however, remains a wild card. THC-infused sodas cannot be transported across state lines according to Federal laws (despite individual state laws regarding medicinal marijuana use), so the product would have to be manufactured in California to be sold there.

Plans are tentatively to have it in California dispensaries in the spring.

Canna Cola on Facebook

Read the Santa Cruz Sentinel article

Puppy Chow. PhyDough Is An Organic Food Truck For Dogs!

Gourmet cookies, ice cream and take-home dough are for the dogs. At least these particular ones are. And delivered in a gourmet food truck, no less.


above: Truck graphics designed by Coolhaus

PhyDough is the brainchild of Patrick Guilfoyle, self-proclaimed dog lover, food snob and Francophile. Owner of Burbank's Double Dog Dare Ya, Patrick originally began by creating preservative-free cookie dough for dog owners to bake the treats for their canines at home. Upon recognizing the growing popularity of gourmet food trucks, he teamed up with Natasha Case of Coolhaus Ice Cream Truck fame who heped him to bring the PhyDough Truck to reality.


above: a fan photo from Facebook shows ZuZu, a fan of the peanut butter and bacon ice cream sandwich

above: (another fan photo) Che loooved his peanut butter bacon ice cream and peanut butter cookies :)

Made with organic and human grade ingredients, the treats do not use processed sugar though some contain syrup) and Coolhaus makes the soy or yougurt based ice cream treats for the dogs. The PhyDough itself is available for take-home and bake yourself usage. The products need to be kept in the freezer because they are preservative-free.




Note: these are only for canine consumption, not for children or adults.



Interested in hiring the truck for your next Pawty? Contact them here

Follow them on twitter
Like them on Facebook

Holy Mother of God, This Is What Won the 2010 Jell-O Mold Competition.

Artist Shelly Sabel was this year's Grand Prize winner in the Gowanus Studio Space's Jell-O Mold competition with her inventive "Aspic Ascension - Tastes Like Heaven", a Bloody Mary tomato aspic formed in the shape of the Virgin Mary.

Watch her wiggle (shown in clear gelatin):


The entry was presented like an altar, complete with burning candles and a 'glitzy' rosary:



The poster for the 2010 GSS Jell-O Mold competition and Grand Prize winner Shelly Sabel:

video, images and info courtesy of artist Shelly Sabel and Gowanus Studio

There's always more room for Jell-O!
So be sure to see the other post today on Jelloware, the edible drinking cups that are good for the planet!


and don't miss Liz Hickock's Jell-O cast city!

A Sweet Treat For Control Freaks. Chocri Custom Organic Exotic Chocolate Bars.

No, I'm not talking about just adding your own label or uploading a picture to the wrapper. I'm talking about truly creating your own chocolate bars from scratch.


above: three examples of possible options for your own created chocolate bars

chocri is a German startup, founded in September 2008, but launched in the US in January 2010. What they do is we allow you to customize your own chocolate bar right on their website.

You start with an organic Belgian chocolate base of milk, white or dark chocolate and then choose from a selection of over 100 of gourmet, organic and exotic ingredients (fruit, grains, nuts, spices, confections and decor).



If you don't know anything about ingredients, they also offer many recommended combinations and options to make the selection simple.

Once you've chosen or built your bar, you can name it (they print the name and the ingredients on the package), and then they hand-make the bars in Germany and ship them off to you.




From bacon to blueberries, pretzels to pecans, you can be as adventurous or as safe as you'd like. I made three to test them out (shown below).


One was dark chocolate with real orange bits and orange chocolate drops, another was milk chocolate, pecans and toffee and the third was milk chocolate with organic salted pretzels and caramel chocolate drops. And yes, they are, er.... were, delicious.

So, how do you do it?
You start with your choice of milk, white or dark chocolate as the base:



Then you are walked through the process to choose as many or as few additives as you wish from the following options (click on each image below to enlarge):

Choose your fruit:

Your spices:

Your nuts:

Your confections:

Your decor:

Your grains:




There's no minimum. You can choose to make one bar or one hundred bars. Once you've selected your ingredients for your chocolate bar(s), they print the name you choose and the ingredients on the individual package, then ship them right to your door.



They use only the best ingredients, such as organic, fair trade chocolate from Belgium. Making them even more delicious is the fact that they also donate a percentage of otheir revenues to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children at the Ivory Coast, and you are free to add your own donation at checkout.


above: the Chocri team

What are you waiting for? With Easter and Mother's Day right around the corner, these would make awesome gifts.
Get started here.




If you like chocolate, you'll love this:

The Art of Chocolate. Oops, Reverse That.