Hahahaha! Silly Baker!! What was I thinking?! Oh right, I'm a kitchen wizard, lol! What I got was not what I was expecting. Apparently, another cookie baker/blogger had at one time, made these adorable sugar cookies that were based on the book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. It's a very sweet story all done in water colors. Ok, so how hard could it be to find some cookie cutters, bake a delicious sugar cookie and make it happen? So of course I promised her the cookies and I wouldn't disappoint!
Let's start with the cookie baker/blogger who had apparently abandoned her blog 2 years ago and had over 100 requests for those cookies. I scoured the internet trying to find her, all to no avail. Do you see a business opportunity? I sure did! An exhaustive search of the internet revealed that while there is a caterpillar cookie cutter on the market, there is no caterpillar cookie cutter for THIS caterpillar. And while I found a lot of other folks out there baking and selling cookies based on this story, none of them even closely resembled what my client was looking for. So a little research was definitely in order!
Right here, let me give a BIG SHOUT OUT to Bake at 350(blogger& sugar cookie maven) and University of Cookie where I spent an exhaustive amount of time reading and watching tutorial videos until I had the confidence to get started. A million Thank You's!
What I discovered was that sometimes you have to make your own cookie cutter and sometimes you can have one custom made. In this case, I decided to make my own and use a technique I learned at University of Cookie for when you have to cut the dough by hand.
I also learned that making Royal Icing, piping and flooding isn't nearly as hard or scary as I thought. Gel colors, while they get a bad rap, don't really make the icing taste bad if you make a good tasting icing! However, the cookie should always be the star of the show so make sure it tastes delicious!
Most importantly, remember, it is just a cookie! Yes, people will oooh! and aaah! over how it looks but it's not life or death, it's fun!
So somewhere between making the dough and seeing my caterpillar begin to come to life, creativity kicked in. Why just ice the cookie when I could actually make it look like the watercolor paintings in the book? Ah-ha! Now I was on to something! And oh! by the way...don't forget all the fruits! That was one hungry caterpillar!
In the end, I was pretty pleased with my results. I'd have to say that this was perhaps one of my most challenging cookie adventures but now I am hooked! It's a great tasting, sturdy cookie that looks fabulous and I am ready to take on other characters but I have a feeling that this Very Hungry Caterpillar will be the show stopper for a long time to come!
