Is this the Serencooki?
Bungle in the Jungle?
(I WAS listening to Rush last night, so I guess they could be the {wait for it, wait for it} SerenGeddy set. Gah, that was bad.)
I don't know quite what to call them. But I do know that if you wanted more cute little plains animals, you'd have to go to Kenya (can you believe it? Forget Norway...more like Snoreway).
A friend called me up to do some cookies for her son's 1st birthday, and she sent me this photo of the themed set she was using. Well, I'd been secretly looking for an excuse to make some brightly-colored animals, so I of course jumped at the opportunity to make these.
Here are the inspiration animals. Let's be honest, I blatantly ripped them off.
After careful study of the source material (ie: looking at the printout while stuck in traffic), I realized that I'd have to make a whole set of cutters to get the shapes right, so that was the first order of business:
The lion is actually 2 cookies, stacked on top of each other. I didn't make his mane as its own cutter, I used an existing sunflower-shaped cutter and rolled it flatter. The giraffe head is also the zebra head, I just cut off the horns and changed the ear position a little bit after cutting them out.
So I got to work, and the hardest and most time-consuming part of this set was definitely the array of bright colored icing that had to me made and matched. The hippo alone has seven different colors, some piped on, some painted with a small brush. Yikes. (I'm not insane, really. My friends have started referring to it as OCDetail)
The kid's name is "Teagan," despite my husband's insistence that it is actually "Triscuit," so I made his name and jazzed it up with yet more icing. I'm kind of glad I won't be at this party - there is kind of a lot of sugar going on in these cookies...
Cookielion on the prowl:
As an unlooked-for bonus, I realized after making the cutouts that the hippo head doubles nicely as a portly owl: