My sweet friend Ginny is so trusting.
She asked me to make decorated sugar cookies for a family baby shower and when I asked her what design she would like, she responded, "The artist you are will produce fabulous results, I’ll leave it to you. " I really wanted to reward her faith in me with some extra special cookies.
Well thanks to my daughter Una, I knew exactly what I would make for my friend.
You see, Una had just attended a
white elephant party and came home with a new set of Martha Stewart Noah's Ark Copper Cookie Cutters.
"I chose these just for you," she said when she presented me with the big beautiful set. I couldn't believe it, what a wonderful gift and truly proof that one man's trash is another man's treasure.
"Was it a struggle to win them?," I asked her, thinking there was surely a lot of trading and fighting to get them. "No, not really, no one else was that interested," she said. Boy was I lucky there weren't any cookie decorators at that party! It was kismet and that's how these animal cookies came about and when I presented them to Ginny she was very pleased.
Here's how I made them:
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| The cutters. |
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| The baked cookies. These are big cookies and it took four batches of dough to get 24 cookies, six of each. |
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| I started by flooding all of the cookies. White for the polar bear. |
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| White for the sheep. |
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| Blue/gray for the elephants. I also flooded the lions with yellow and the kangaroos with brown. |
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| When it came time to flood the giraffes, I used yellow but also had some brown icing ready in a pastry bag fitted with a #1 tip. |
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| After adding the basecoat, I immediately dropped on some dots of brown. |
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| I used a scribe tool to shape them so that they didn't just look like brown dots. I let all of the cookies dry before moving onto the next step. |
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| With a black edible ink marker, I added face details. |
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| And some toe details too. |
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| For the sheep, I added some wool by piping on swirls of stiff royal icing. I also added a mane and tail to the lions by using stiff orange tinted icing. |
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| After adding some face details with edible markers, I decided the sheep also needed a bit of "wool" on top of their heads. |
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| The elephants got details added with a black edible marker and tusks using the same stiff icing I used for the sheep's wool. I used a brown edible marker to add the horn, hoof and tail details to the giraffes. |
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| The elephant's are my favorite. |
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| Let the cookies dry completely before packaging. |
