St. Patrick's Day Cookies, The Try Outs

March 17th is just around the corner and there is an ever present green hue in the stores now. That got Suzy Q and me in the mood for a few tester cookies to try our hand at the St. Patrick’s Day cookies. We went through the shelves of cutters and again, did not find exactly what we wanted. So to hand cutting and experimenting we went. You can see our other post about making the best of what you’ve got to work with and see where that takes your imagination.

Now when I think of St. Patrick’s Day, I think of the colors of Ireland, green, white and orange, I think leprechauns, 4 leaf clovers (I know, not traditional to the holiday, but they are still lucky), shamrocks, rainbows and pots of gold. We were hard pressed to find many cookie cutters that met our criteria, other than the shamrock, a cauldron we could use for the pot of gold and a rainbow with clouds.

I set out on the 4 leaf clover first. Knowing the shape well, I grabbed a heart cutter and cut out four small hearts to stick together and see if they would work for what I wanted. I used my spatula to press down the center of the hearts to get the edges worked together.

The center has been pressed down and is a bit thinner than the rest of the cookie. After it bakes, you will see that it has the same height as the edges do.

I was careful to pick a size heart that would not look too large next to the shamrock cutter that I would be using.

4 leaf clover cookie next to the shamrock cookie

The final products of the shamrock on the left and the 4 leaf clover on the right.

I’m not a fan of using the 4 leaf clover as a solo cookie, rather I like to use it for a background.

After we got the clover all worked out, we needed to give the leprechaun a try. Suzy Q and I looked around Google and Pinterest to see if there were any creative ideas out there that someone had already made. The number one thing we kept seeing was folks using a flower cutter to make the leprechaun face. We liked it, but didn’t like the idea of having blank cookie space where there was no icing/artwork. We grabbed the flower and a knife and went to town.

After we had the blanks cut, I flattened out the top for his hat, as this is where most of the modification was going to come from.

Then I started to give the hat a bit more dimension by cutting the left and right sides of it down to the indentation of one of the petals. Both horizontal and vertical cuts were made on each side here. You want to get it as close to symmetrical as possible.

I had to give the hat a brim, so another cut was made going down into the upper most petal. A vertical and horizontal cut was made on each side.

Not liking our little leprechaun having an oddball beard, I used a knife to round out what was left of the top petals, below the brim of the hat.

And the baked cookie.

Now while Suzy Q and I were whipping up the icing colors, we forgot two major items, black flood and flesh colored flood. This resulted in a chunky icing for the leprechaun’s hat and well, no icing for his flesh tone. See mistakes happen, you just gotta roll with it and make the best of what you’ve got.