Turtle Cookies

I pre-scheduled this post to publish right around the time Ron and I along with all of my sisters and their families will be in my nephew’s backyard in Milton, Ontario hopefully having surprised the heck out of my sister Gina on the occasion of her 60th birthday!  Her son Kory and daughter Kristy have been scheming behind the scenes for weeks and have gathered together all of their aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to help Gina celebrate this very special milestone.  She is my second oldest sister and we actually share the same birth month, born only three years and nine days apart from one another.  There is another sister, Carrie born before me and after Gina and two more born after me, Janice and Brenda.  While we are all marking off the years as they come, realizing that as our children and grand-children grow older so too do we but as *old* as we may be getting, we still remember how to have a lot of fun.  Our get-togethers are always marked with gales of laughter (ever seen a bunch of old gals try to show-up the younger ones doing a few turns with a hoola-hoop?!)

Kristy asked me if I could make some cookies for her Mom’s surprise party and given that Gina loves turtles (they hold a special meaning to her family) turtle cookies seemed like the perfect thing to do.  Her favourite colour is yellow so I incorporated that for her too.  I also made a turtle out of royal icing a long time ago, just for this occasion but being that the birthday gathering was a surprise, I am only now able to post it.

The turtle cookies were made with the use of my KopyKake projector.  I traced the picture of the turtle onto all the cookies first and then began decorating.  I normally use my KopyKake just to get the image onto the cookies and find the decorating goes quicker once this step has been completed.

Once you have traced the turtle onto all your cookies, it’s time to start piping and flooding in the design.

I piped and flooded the base of the shell in yellow first and then piped and flooded the remainder of the turtle in a dark shade of green.  A lighter shade of green was used to flood the head, tail and shell.

The darker shade of green was used to flood the feet of the turtle.

Then I added the yellow detail on the shell and let the cookies dry overnight.

The next day the grass detail was added (lighter green shade) and the facial detail was drawn on using a black edible marker.

As I write this, we haven’t even left for Milton yet and I’m so excited to see my family and to surprise my sister!  Gina’s birthday was actually on Wednesday and in chatting with her on email she said she hoped it would pass quietly.  Thursday may have been quiet Gina but hang on to your party hat because TODAY is gonna be a whole new ball game!

Once we are settled back at home I will do a tutorial post on how to make that big royal icing turtle.  You know….just in case you may need to make one someday

P.S.  During the writing of this post I received this picture from Gina.  Glad to see that her co-workers remembered this special milestone too!  You are looking mighty fine Sis!

Tagged as: Royal Icing Turtle, Turtle Cookies