Two years ago I made these dump truck cookies for my husband's cousin Kristen, who has throwing a dump truck themed birthday party for her son, and last summer she requested Pokemon cookies for a Pokemon themed birthday party! Her son Caleb absolutely loves Pokemon, and knows all the names of the characters!
Since Kristen is back in Hawaii (where my husband is from), I'd be shipping the cookies, and all the Pokemon cookie cutters that I could find had a Pokemon with a long tail. When I told Kristen I thought the tails might break during shipping, we decided that I could just make the cookies round, with Pokemon's face on them! We also decided to do half the cookies Pokemon, and the other half would be pokeballs! (I actually didn't know what these were at the time, and had to look them up!)
For the cookies, I used my go-to sugar cookie recipe (which you can find in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), which I chilled, rolled out to 1/8 inch thick, and cut out with round cookie cutters. Then I baked them at 350F for 10-12 minutes, until the edges were golden brown.
Once the cookies had cooled, I made a batch of royal icing (recipe also in my book!), tinted half of it yellow (I used a combination of lemon yellow and golden yellow), and then used stiff yellow icing to pipe the circle outline, before filling it in with runny yellow icing.
Once the icing was dry (I like to let it dry for several hours, or overnight), I used black stiff icing to pipe the eyes, nose, and mouth (complete with tongue hanging out!)
Next came red icing for the cheeks, and a final dot of white in the eyes to make them pop.
For the pokeballs, I started by outlining each cookie with stiff black icing...
... and then piped the details of the pokeball.
Then I filled in the pokeballs with runny white icing in the center and the bottom half of the circle, and runy red icing in the top half of the circle.
And then they were done!
I thought they turned out really cute, even if Pokemon looks kind of abstract! And with the addition of the pokeballs, any kid would know that it's Pokemon, right?
To send them off, I wrapped each one in a cellophane favor bag, tied it with raffia, and carefully filled my shipping box with alternating layers of big bubble wrap, cookies, bubble wrap, cookies, etc., with a double layer of bubble wrap at the top and bottom of the box. And apparently they all made it there with no breakage! Yay!
Happy Birthday, Caleb!
