Baby Shower Animal Cookies

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:

The cutters.

The baked cookies. These are big cookies and it took four batches of dough to get 24 cookies, six of each.

I started by flooding all of the cookies. White for the polar bear.

White for the sheep.

Blue/gray for the elephants. I also flooded the lions with yellow and the kangaroos with brown.

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.

After adding the basecoat, I immediately dropped on some dots of brown.

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.

With a black edible ink marker, I added face details.

And some toe details too.

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.

After adding some face details with edible markers, I decided the sheep also needed a bit of "wool" on top of their heads.

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.

The elephant's are my favorite.

Let the cookies dry completely before packaging.