team umizoomi cookies

Last year I made these monkey and elephant cookies for my friend Cindy K, who was throwing a birthday party for her daughter Reese. This year she asked me to make cookies again, and this time the theme was Team Umizoomi, a cartoon which Reese loves! We decided that I would make them rectangular cookies with the characters on top - mainly to spare having my hubby make three separate custom cutters, but also because I thought they would look really cute that way!

Normally I would have piped the characters directly on top of the cookies, but this time I knew that since each character had a lot of detail, I would need a guide to help me keep the proportions right. So I decided to first pipe the characters onto waxed paper, with a picture of each character below the waxed paper to serve as a guide. So I started by whipping up a batch of royal icing (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book), I divided and tinted the icing based on all the colors that I would need (it ended up being a LOT of colors!)

Then I piped the characters on to the waxed paper, waiting for each layer of icing to dry before proceeding with each character's details. Here's Milli...

And here's Geo and Bot. (For Milli and Geo's eyebrows and smile, I used a brown edible food marker.)

I let the characters dry overnight, and the next day I start on the cookies. I baked up my favorite sugar cookies (recipe also in my book) and used a custom copper square cutter (made by hubby) to cut out my rectangular shapes.

Once the cookies were cooled, I outlined them with stiff white royal icing.

Then I filled them in with runny white royal icing, peeled each character off of the waxed paper, and dropped them onto the wet icing.

Then I let them dry overnight once more before packaging them individually in cellophane favor bags.

I thought they turned out pretty cute! One thing I'd do different next time is let the base icing dry a little bit before adding the characters, because as I was packaging the cookies I noticed that a few of the cookies had colors bleed into the white icing.

Happy Birthday, little Reese! Hope you enjoyed your cookies!!!

monkey and elephant cookies

After I made these caterpillar cookies for my friend Nancy's daughter's first birthday party, our friend Cindy K. got a chance to see and taste the cookies, and then asked me to make cookies for her daughter Reese's birthday as well! If you know Reese, she is quite the monkey, always climbing up on couches, counters, window sills, you name it! So it seemed only natural for Cindy to be throwing a monkey-themed party! She asked for monkey and elephant cookies, and luckily I already had these Wilton cutters which were perfect!

After baking up 2 batches of my buttery sugar cookies (recipe in my new book!), I whipped up a batch of royal icing (recipe also in the book!), divided it, and colored it. First up were the monkey cookies. I used brown stiff royal icing to outline the face and the ears. Then I used brown runny icing to fill them in.

After letting them dry for several hours (overnight), I used tan stiff icing to pipe an oval outline on the monkey's face, and then filled it in with tan runny icing. Then I used pink runny icing to fill in the ears. Once the tan icing had dried for several hours, I used black stiff icing to pipe the eyes, nose, and mouth. Cute!

For the elephant cookies, I started with stiff gray icing to pipe the elephant outline, as well as the outline of the inner ear, before filling it in with runny gray icing.

Once the icing had dried (overnight), I used runny pink icing to fill in the ears, and black stiff icing to pipe the eyes, nostrils, and smile. Super cute!

Once the cookies had all dried completely, I wrapped each one in a cellophane bag tied with raffia. Then I boxed them up with fat bubble wrap, and sent them on their way to Cindy!

Happy Birthday, Reese! Hope you had an awesome day, you little monkey! :)