I got a request to make a bee cookie card for the birthday of a friend or relative of a friend of mine. So I did, and I decided to decorate some more cookies aswell since I had leftover dough and some royal icing. Also a friend of mine just returned from a 4 month trip to the other side of the world and being there had missed both my cake party and also bebes which she really likes. So I figured I just had to make her some bebes and I gave her some cookies too. Plus I was studying for an exam the whole weekend so I needed something completely different to do while I was on breaks. Hence this weekend turned out to be very productive.

I used a white cookie dough which is basically just basic short pastry dough (murotaikina, used for example in the Apple & pear squares) with some added sugar (recipe originally from Kinuskikissa).

Short pastry dough for cookies:

- 125 g margarine or butter

- 1,5 dl sugar

- 1 egg

- 2 1/2 dl wheat flour

- 1 tl baking powder

- 2 tsp vanilla sugar

Make the dough the same way as in the Apple & pear squares and let it be in the fridge for atleast half an hour to an hour. This dough is quite hard to work with especially when making large cookies like I was going to do with the bee now. If you want an easily workable dough, you should use the gingerbread dough or something similar instead.

I rolled the dough flat using a lot of flour on a silicon baking mat. I placed my cookie shape on top of the dough and cut that shape out of the dough. The shape would have been impossible to move from there in one piece so I baked it on the silicon mat in about 200 degrees celcius for less than 10 mins. It still got a bit dark, but atleast it would not be too soft and shouldn't break so easily. The small cookies I made from the excess dough I baked for just 3-5 mins.

 

I decorated the bee and the small cookies with some royal icing. I dyed the icing in some ziplock bags by putting in some color and squishing the icing around in the bag to dissolve the color to it. On the bee I also drew on with a food color pen.

Here's one phase of the making of the bee cookie and the finished bee, also wrapped:

 

And here is a gallery of some strange cookies. They vary from quite normal pretty cookies, to psychedelic cookies and some hell of a batch of cookies.

 

The bebes I made just for fun and for my friend. Their recipe can be found in here. I wanted to try some different kinds of decoration and I had some excess icing so I did just that. They're quite a mix, none of them being exactly like the other.

 

Piparikortti - Mehiläinen - Bebeleivokset - Psykedeeliset piparit - Mörköpipari - Murotaikina