Animal Crackers

Today I hosted a sort of birthday party for a bunch of kids that are all right around E's age. As per my normal obsessive compulsive self, I decided that I had to make something crazy. So I decided to make some fancypants animal cookies. I will say though that unlike my usual, I did do a little bit of forethought and planning this time around. I took advantage of the fact that my in-laws were here all last week, which gave me time to bake the cookies over the weekend and at least get started on the decorating.

One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the icing on these types of cookies takes forever to dry. So you usually have to do one part, like say, the outline, and then give that time to dry. Then you fill in the middle part and that has to dry (usually overnight), and then any little embellishments have to be done last and allowed to dry as well. So on average, between baking and decorating, they take about 3-4 days to make.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. I think that they could've been neater, but I always think that. The colors could've been brighter too, but I was trying to save time by just adding to pre-mixed colors. There were actually 10 animals in the set, but I skipped the monkey, polar bear and camel. The monkey just seemed like an odd shape, the polar bear seemed boring, and the camel just didn't seem to fit in with the others. In retrospect, I probably would've made more lions (I somehow only made one) and skipped the gorillas and rhinos. They were kind of blah. I think the giraffes turned out the best.