This week I got to make some fun luau cookies for a sweet little girl who is turning 5. I had sketched out the cookies I wanted to make and then sat down to go through my cookie cutter collection to figure out which cutters would fit the designs I had in mind. For all the cookie cutters I own, you would think that I would just make cookies in the shapes of my cookie cutters. But no, as usual I found myself cutting dough and sticking different shapes together to get the cookies I wanted. But it was worth the extra trouble. I especially wanted to include hibiscus cookies in this platter. I couldn’t find a way to easily do a 5 petal hibiscus with what I had so I went with a standard 6 petal cookie cutter. Here is how to transform a standard flower into a Hawaiian Luau hibiscus.
To start with you need to flood the cookie in the colour of your choice. To keep it from looking like a regular flower I made the petal tips slightly pointed.
Once the cookie has dried overnight it’s ready for a little colour in the center. To do this I put a decent sized blob of icing in the middle and using a food-only paintbrush, dragged the icing towards the edges.
Once it has dried for at least an hour (or overnight if you decorate after your kids are in bed like I do) you’re ready for the fun part.
Pipe a border around the cookie edge with a #2 tip and then with the cookie in the middle of a coffee filter (or similar) sprinkle generously with sanding sugar. You want to put the sanding sugar on quite thick so that the entire border gets covered.
Once you’ve completely covered the border with sanding sugar, gently pick up the cookie by the edges, being careful not to squash the wet icing on the border (not that I’m speaking from experience!!) and tip off the excess sanding sugar into the coffee filter.
There will probably be extra sugar that doesn’t slide off easily, especially in the corners. So using a food-only paintbrush, brush off the excess sugar.
Then you can just pick up the coffee filter and pour all that sugar back into your dish, ready to do the next cookie! You want to work with one cookie at a time when doing this so that the border is still wet when you add the sanding sugar.
Then for the final step, pipe a slightly curved yellow line for the stamen letting the icing build up more at the center and less near the edges so that it looks thicker in the middle of the cookie.
While the icing is still wet drop a few yellow non-pareilles onto the end of the stamen. Any extra’s you can just shake off the cookie when you’re done.
These work great on their own
or as part of a set
