Christmas cake and cookies gift

It's been so long since I have blogged I can't believe it's March already!  Our computer decided to have a meltdown at the end of last year and so I haven't been able to put up any pictures of what I've been up to. 
Well I decided to switch it on again today and lo and behold it is up and running again!  Maybe it just needed a holiday too!

Well this post is either very late or very early but I thought I should post some pictures of a Christmas cake and cookie tree stack I did.  The cake is fruit cake and the cookies are lemon based shortbread.

The fondant striped bow was really easy and fun to do and I really must put together a simple tutorial on it soon.  Fingers crossed the computer works next time I start it up!  But just in case, here is a quick run down on how I did the stripes.

Roll a sheet of white fondant as your base.  Then overlap with strips of red at even intervals.  Gently roll over the strips with your rolling pin so the red fondant merges with the white.  Cut out strips for your bow and ribbon and you have your striped ribbon.  I used a new set of cutters from Patchwork for the letters.   A bit fiddly but I am sure I will get the hang of it soon.  I then painted the letters with edible gold paint.

The cookie stack was a lot of fun to do.  I baked lots of star shaped cookies in various sizes using the Wilton star cookie cutter set, decorated them with royal icing and silver dragees and then stacked them together, criss crossing the cookies along the way to get the effect you see in the picture below. 

Very effective don't you think?  It would look really nice in green too of course.  You could even pipe little icicles on the edges of each cookie to make it look like snow.

Thanks for looking!

Monica