Owl Cookies!

Saturday was my friend Traci's baby shower (yes, the same Traci as in this post). She is having a boy sometime in June, and she is decorating the nursery with owls, so the theme of the shower was owls. Around Valentine's Day, I watched an episode of The Martha Stewart Show highlighting the creation of some love bird owl cookies, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out the recipe. So I used the cookie recipe found here. I followed the recipe, for the most part, but I ran out of sugar, so for the last 1/2 cup I used dark brown sugar instead of white sugar. I also added some cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to give them a little more pizazz. I think the lemon juice combine with the spices really made a difference.

The directions for the cookies included a template for cutting out he owl shapes. Cutting them out by hand was a great deal more time consuming than I thought, but they turned out really cool.The dough was nice weight, so it wasn't difficult to transfer them to a cookie sheet. And the dough baked very nicely too, with no sticking. I was also surprised as to how many cookies it made, despite the face the cookies themselves were stinking huge.

So obviously, since Traci knew she was having a boy, I decided to go toward more male-typical colors. I was going to do a bright green, bright blue, and chocolate brown, but I ran out of yellow food coloring, so I ended up using a more muted blue green, but it still looked pretty cool. I used a chocolate royal icing recipe for the brown which I found here at Food.com (it tasted really good). Then, since royal icing was so much more simple than I realized, I decided not to use a recipe for the plain royal icing and to wing it instead. It worked out fine.

I put the icing in squeeze bottles and followed the directions on the website. I outlined the cookie and then filled it in, using a butter knife to spread out the filling. I also put in the stripes in the opposite color and used a knife to swirl it a bit.

Long story short (although not really I guess), they turned out really cool looking and really yummy. I had to play around with the decorations a bit. I tried using marshmallows for the eyes, but ended up using York Peppermint Patty Pieces with icing dots in the middle. I used cut up Dots gum drops for the beak. I decided not to do the feet because I thought they looked dumb.

Here's the finished product...