Cookie of the Month - Dino Sugar Cookies

I asked the Nelsons (the people who bought my cookies at the scholarship auction) if they had a preference for this month's cookie.  They said they'd like dinosaur cookies for their grandsons who would be visiting over Memorial Day.  I saw these big mouth chompers made with a heart shaped cookie cutter several places online.  By the way, if you want to see some beautiful cookies check out Sweet SugarBelle's blog.  Amazing!  She's a cookie artist if there ever was one.

Usually I like my sugar cookies with a nice butter cream frosting - tasty, fluffy and soft.  However, with butter cream I wouldn't have been able to get a clear design and I can never stack them - so this time I decided to use a corn syrup frosting that actually semi-hardens in a couple of hours.  It worked just as I hoped.  Let me walk you through the design, but first let's talk recipes.  The recipe I use for the cookies (by the way, it's the best sugar cookie I've ever eaten) can be found in a post from last September.  The new shiny frosting recipe follows:

Corn Syrup Frosting

1 cup powdered sugar

2 teaspoons milk

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1/4 teaspoon lemon extract

To thin, add a little more corn syrup or drops of milk.  This yummy frosting can be piped on for borders as well as filling in.  It doesn't get too hard and stays nice and shiny.  I mixed this amount up several times and tinted as needed.  I doubled this recipe for the green icing on these cookies - about 36 cookies. 

Start with the heart on it's side and outline the dinosaur's mouth.  I use paste food colorings and just add a bit of several colors to get black.  If it's reddish, add green to kill the red.  If it's too green, add red to kill the green... pretty soon you'll have black.  I piped this on with a pastry bag fitted with a #3 tip.

Squeeze a bit more frosting inside the mouth.

Smooth it out with a tapered spatula or another pointed tool.

Here's your mouth so far.

Fill in red for the tongue.

With green frosting, outline the rest of the cookie.

Fill in with more green.  I think I like this green for dinosaurs because somewhere in the back of my head I think they all should be green like the old Sinclair Gas Station dinosaur.

Last, add the teeth and eyes.  To get a nice opaque white, I used a small amount of royal frosting for the eyeballs and the teeth using a #2 tip for the teeth and #3 for the eyes.  Here's the royal frosting recipe I use:  

Royal Frosting

(small amount)

1 egg white

1 1/4 cup powdered sugar

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar  

 (Whip for five minutes on high)

Add a dot of black glaze to complete the eyes and you are finished with your fearsome and scary dinosaur cookies.  They'll harden enough to stack in about 90 minutes.  Go ahead and chomp the chompers.  Oooh, yummy!