rainbow cookies

My friend Helen was throwing a birthday party for her daughter Marni's 2nd  birthday, and to go along with her requested naked funfetti birthday cake and Pink Panther cookies, I also made these rainbow cookies!

Since I didn't have any rainbow cookie cutters, I had my talented husband made me a custom copper cutter, as he often has.

For the cookies, I made a couple of batches of my sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), and let them chill in the fridge for 30 minutes before rolling them out and stamping out my rainbow cookies. After they had baked and cooled, I made my royal icing and got to work with the piping!

I started by piping my cloud outline with stiff white icing, and then filling it in with runny white icing.

Then came the rainbow part! I used stiff icing to pipe the borders of my rainbow colors ...

... and then filled them in with runny icing. But in the end this method was very time consuming and I ended up using a ton of piping bags (for the stiff icing) and squeeze bottles (for the runny icing). I think if I were to make these again, I would just use a really wide tip in a piping bag with medium icing - not so runny that it would run off the cookies, but not so stiff that it doesn't move. That way I would only have to pipe each color once!

But, they turned out pretty cute anyway. I mean, how can cookies with rainbows and clouds on them not be cute?!

Wheeeeee!