Making Sesame Street's Grover into a Cookie

My friend Jen who is a scientist and a baker at heart asked me for advise about making candy Grover lolly- pops. I of course immediately thought of making Grover Cookies. So I asked her if I could make them for her daughter Cece's 2nd birthday party, she said yes.

I started by using a basic butter cookie recipe (I prefer butter cookies to sugar) and a round cookie cutter. Place the cookies on a baking sheet then insert a lolly-pop stick into each cookie before baking. If the sticks come through you can reinforce that area with extra cookie dough. Not to worry you won't see it once the cookies have icing.

To Ice the cookies I use a standard Royal Icing Recipe.

3 Tablespoons Meringue Powder
4 cups (about 1 lb.) confectioners sugar
6 tablespoons warm water

Mix all ingredients together and separate into 5 zip-loc bags. Add the specified colors to each bag. The Blue bag should be the bag with the most icing. You will need Blue (Grover's Body), White (Grover's eye's), Pink (Grover's nose), Black (Grover's eyes), and Red (Grover's mouth).

Okay so once the icing is tinted I like using the bags as piping tools, I just cut a tiny piece of the end of the bag. I just found these tiny bottles which work well also. Once the cookies are baked and cool you will pipe the royal icing out in the same pattern as shown in the photo above. While the icing is still wet you sprinkle matching color jimmies (sprinkles). The Jimmies look like fur.
Once Grover is furry let the cookies dry for about 20 minutes.

Once the fur is dry you fill the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. Then let the cookie dry for 15-20 more minute. Do the black of the eyes last. Let the cookies dry for a few hours before packaging. The royal icing will be hard to the touch when it's completely dry.

I use the same technique to make the other Sesame Street characters.

http://www.wilton.com/recipe/Royal-Icing

Eating Cupcakes in the Rain

So while the rain has been getting a lot of people down, I have the perfect trick to keep us all happy no matter the weather. I took the Cupcakes and Cookies to the 6th Annual Allentown Street Festival, Despite all of our wishes it rained...again! But we got lucky an Sharon the event organizer put us under a gazebo so we stayed dry. I set up our table and waited.

Even in the rain, they came! And they wanted cupcakes!

(Artist Kerri Stevens enjoying a Chocolate Cupcake with Chocolate butter cream, she makes the most amazing things out of recycled things. Like wallets out of milk cartons....amazing!)


(Community organizer, Artist, Puppeteer & Chef extraordinaire Yodi enjoying a vanilla cupcake with vanilla butter cream. Yodi is the go to man of Allentown, he organizers these really cool gorilla style art exhibits, makes bigger than life puppets and I just found out he's also a Chef.)

I tried some new ideas for the cookies. Sesame Street and Sponge Bob! There was Grover (my friend Jen gave me that idea), Oscar the Grouch, (was Veronica and Blair's idea) Elmo, some stars for Father's Day and Sponge Bob. The cookies just flew off the table, because what kid can resist these character cookie!

So now we know the secret to beating the "rainy day blues".....Lehigh Valley Cupcakes!!!!!

Great for eating in the rain!

Artist, Melissa Reinbold and her guy eating cupcakes under umbrella. Melissa makes beautiful new pieces of jewelry from found objects and old broken jewelry. She's also a talented graphics designer and helping me with a new logo for Lehigh Valley Cupcakes. They thought the icing "tastes like ice cream"...I LOVE IT!!!!!

Stay tuned and stay dry..... I'm going to show you how I made those cute Grover cookies.