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12/16/2023

My Cherry Jingle Bells

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In 2018, I released a video on YouTube called My Holiday Traditions. In it, I talked about a cookie I developed as a kid called Cherry Jingle Bells and I mentioned the recipe would be linked in the description. Well, the problem was, I wasn’t sure at the time how to share it as a young 20-year-old. Now that I’m a mature 25-year-old, I’ve decided to make a blog post with the recipe.

History

My mom and I baked a lot throughout my childhood, especially at Christmas time. We’ve made sugar cookies, gingerbread, peanut butter blossoms, peppermint pinwheels, you name it. When I was 9 years old, I wanted to make a sandwich cookie. I told my mom about trying a cinnamon, almond cookie with strawberry filling. My mom suggested cherry would complement the flavors better and she was right. We made these cookies for the first time in 2007 for our holiday cookie exchange party at our new house, and they were a hit. We’ve made them every year since.
Note, this recipe is a tweaked version of the sugar cookie recipe from Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook

INgredients

2/3 cups butter, softened
2/3 cups shortening
4 cups all-purpose flower
2 eggs
1½ cups sugar
2 Tbsp milk
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Dash of salt

Filling

2 jars Desert Cherries (We use some from Trader Joe’s)
1 bag frozen dark, sweet cherries

Simple Icing (Based on Better Homes and Gardens)

1 cup sifted powdered sugar.
1/4 tsp almond extract
1 Tbsp milk

Instructions

Preheat oven to 375°.
Beat butter and shortening with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 60 seconds. Add about half of the flour, the egg, sugar, milk, baking powder, almond extract, cinnamon, and salt. Beat till thoroughly combined. Beat in the remaining flour. Divide the dough in half. Cover; chill for 3 hours.
On a lightly floured surface, roll half of the dough at a time 1/8-inch thick. Cut into bells with a bell-shaped cookie cutter. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 7 to 8 minutes or till the edges are firm and bottoms are very lightly browned. Cool cookies on a rack.
After cookies have cooled, spread 1 tsp cherry filling (recipe below) on one cookie and top with another, making a sandwich cookie.

Filling

Drain cherries and reserve the syrup.
Put cherries (both candied and frozen) in food processor and pulse until finely chopped (4 – 5 times)
Bring syrup to a boil and add cherry puree. Bring to boil again and reduce heat and simmer lightly for 10 -13 minutes. Once mixture is thick like jam, turn off heat & cool completely.
If mixture doesn’t thicken, mix 1 Tbsp cornstarch with 1 Tbsp water, and slowly add to cherries, stirring constantly and bring to a boil again and cook for 1 minute. Turn off the heat and cool completely.

Simple Icing (Based on Better Homes and Gardens)

Mix powdered sugar, almond extract, and milk.
Add additional milk 1 tsp at a time until icing is thin enough to spread.

Decorating

After all the cookies are filled, get your icing and an offset spatula to frost the cookies. You can use the simple icing recipe above or you can use a simple royal icing recipe of your choosing. Nothing too heavy that overpowers the cookie. You want to add a small amount of icing to cover in a thin layer over the top of the cookie.

My favorite way to decorate these cookies is using silver/gold/yellow sprinkles for the main bell, and a silver or gold candy for the clapper, and holly berry candies (white or red berries) on the top.

Another fun method to use is putting royal icing in a pipe bag and making lacy designs on the cookies (this won’t work with the icing above, use royal icing for this) At the end of the day, you can make your cookies look how you want. Get creative and have fun.

That’s all there is to it. I hope you all enjoy these cookies; they are a favorite in my family. If you do make them, please show me by tagging me in photos on Instagram @littleanimatedmecomics or @littlemecomix on twitter. Thanks for reading, Happy Holidays and Have an ANIMATEDLY Happy New Year!!!

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2/23/2023

Redesigning Store

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Have you ever noticed that when you decide to make a healthier decision for yourself, there’s always a reminder that you want a donut instead? This happens to me towards the beginning of the year when I have my resolutions. Unfortunately, this is also the time of year where you have leftover Christmas cookies, New Year’s brie, and then Valentine’s treats. And worst of all, leftover baked goods go on sale at the grocery store.

I first posted my comic Store in February 2019. This comic demonstrates how I implemented more complex backgrounds and stronger storytelling poses into my work. At the time, this was a dramatic upgrade over my previous comics, but four years later I’ve decided that there’s still room for improvement. Heck, at the time I was still using "everyone’s favorite font."

So, the key artistic issues with the original comic are that the perspective and scaling are off. For example, in panel 3, the eye level[1] is completely off from where the camera is (above her head) and the scaling[2] makes the objects gigantic compared to the character. This was before I took a linear perspective course, but now I have the foundation to approach fixing these issues. For starters, I made PNGs of simple 1-point and 2-point perspective guides. These tools speed up the process of establishing eye levels and vanishing points. For panel 3, I aligned the eye level with the angle of the camera. I also used a scaling dummy to properly scale the objects in the scene with the character in frame. In the new panel, you can see more of the scene without everything looking squished together and overall, it has more depth.

[1] Where the viewers eyes are (height, angle, etc.) looking at an object, not always on the horizon. Perspective vanishing points will converge to this line.
[2] Drawing objects accurately in proportion to one another (size, height, depth, etc.)

panel 3 original

panel 3 redo

panel 4 original

panel 4 redo

Another thing I wanted to improve from the original is the character’s acting and body language. I worked on this in nearly every panel (where the character is the focus). The strongest panel that demonstrates this is panel 4 where the character is yelling at donuts. The original reads as irritated and commanding with flushed cheeks and a pointed finger, but with straightened legs and arms she appears stiff. In the new panel, I made her lunge with her knees bent to have her shift her weight forward instead of hinging at the hips. I also made her hair swoosh back a bit to add more movement to the pose. Lastly, I opened her mouth to take up more face space to really show that she’s yelling full voice. Overall, I think the new panel shows the same emotions as the original, it just expresses them more clearly through looser body language and larger facial expressions.

All in all, I’m very happy with how this comic turned out. Despite me having a better artistic foundation, this was still a challenging comic because of the more perspective-heavy backgrounds. But hey, struggling means that you’re growing, and I hope to grow more by improving my past comics.
Now I’d like to ask you guys a few discussion questions. What do you think of the changes I made to this comic? How would you approach fixing the original comic? Are there other perspective errors in the original or the new version that I didn’t mention? How would you have adjusted the character acting to read the same emotions but clearer?

Store Original

Store Redo