baby shower animal cookies

I'm in a baby shower frame of mind over here. On Sunday, our semi-defunct-but-still-very-fond-of-each-other book club is hosting a shower for one of our members. She has graciously celebrated the birth of our collective dozen babies in the past seven years, and we are super excited to be celebrating her first. I'm busy making fondant decorations and planning and revising cake designs in my mind. More on that soon, but I can't spoil any surprises!

So meanwhile... I can't believe I forgot to post pictures of the baby shower cookie favors I made for my sister's dear friend, Kris! Her beautiful baby girl is already over four months old, so you can see how delinquent this post is. Oops. Anyway, Kris has thrown two beautiful showers for my sister, and I was so happy to get to help her celebrate from afar. My sister sent me the shower invitation, and I designed the cookies to match the sweet little animals. The colors don't show up very well here, but the background is chocolate brown and the animals are pale pink and yellow.



To start, I piped a chocolate brown background on all the cookies and let it dry overnight. Then it was time to make the animals. I'm actually terrible at drawing, but piping is actually a little easier. I practiced on an empty cookie sheet just to try to get the animal shapes right. Since the designs are just one color, it's pretty easy to make corrections to the outlines before filling them in. You don't have to rush, but the royal icing starts to set up pretty quickly, so you want to keep it moving. I wanted a smooth edge to the designs, rather than a defined, outlined edge (which looks great if you're using a contrasting color), so I piped outlines of just two cookies, then filled them in completely before moving on. If you wait too long until the outlines harden, they'll be visible on the finished cookie. I found it was easier to do all of one animal before moving on to the next because my hand got more practiced at making the right shapes - getting the bunny's ears just right, or the angle of the bear's arms and legs, or adding the giraffe's horns..

See, here they are all together, using almost every cookie sheet I have in the house. Remember, they have to dry for about 24 hours before the icing is fully hardened, but the icing actually protects the cookie and they really don't go stale, even if they're just sitting out on a cookie sheet in the kitchen.




I did a few extra ones just for fun :-)

Belated congratulations, Kris! I'm so happy for you and your girl!

Comments

Nanette said…
So impressed, as always!
Howard said…
BTW You Rock, when does 'Night Baking' w/ Jami premier on my local cable or satellite TV?
meredith said…
and they were delicious, too! :)