Crawfish Boil Cookies

The other day my son-in-law, Travis, called me and said to look up live crawfish and then call him back. He makes me laugh! So I did and in the second phone call we decided to do a crawfish boil. There is a company called Louisiana Crawfish that will overnight you live crawfish so you can have one. Things are in the works for that to happen August 12. While looking at pictures for boils the colors and shapes just were too good to not make cookies of. I dug through cutters and came up with designs.

For the crawfish I used my #9 or 6 cutter from my 3" numbers set. The sausage was my crayon cookie cutter trimmed down. The potato was a 2 inch round cutter and the corn cob was a square with scalloped sides trimmed so it was a rectangle and rounded off ends.

Traditionally a boil is poured out onto a table covered with newspaper so to mimic that I just painted a very thin layer of very thin white icing onto my #9 cookies and let it dry completely (it only took about 30 minutes.) Then I had this stamp (below) very clean!! And used it with painted on black gel food coloring. Randomly stamped them to get that effect.

I drew a template from my sketches and cut it out. I number the sections according to the order I will apply the icing. You will notice as I began working with these I changed my order a couple times! I traced the template outline on with a red food pen then filled in the inside lines freehand.

my red color in all the sections marked #1.

Sections marked #2 after #1 dried for about 15 minutes which is easy because by the time you get done with all the #1 sections on all the cookies the first ones are ready for the next step. I also added the antenna things to the nose.

Section #3 on the tail and because I had cut a tiny tip on my tipless bag I waited to do the head section which was bigger until after I had done all the legs.

The legs were done with the tiny tip after the tail sections dried a bit then I trimmed the tip a little bigger to say a size two tip and filled in the head and put a tiny black sugar bead on for the eye. I use my cookie tweezers for that!

Well I wanted tiny lines again so I put the bag inside another bag and trimmed a tiny bit off and piped the eye piping and mouth area piping. 

I liked them but thought I could make them better so I got some brownish food color and painted the shadows in then watered down an ivory icing and painted it on the highlight areas. It gave them texture I wasn't expecting but really like. And I love that it looks like they are on newspaper.

Ah the corn...I did these late at night and totally got into it and didn't take any progress pictures...sorry. But to achieve this the base is a darker golden color and on the cut end some white is swirled in while it is wet. Let that base coat dry for 15 to 20 minutes then using a bit thicker than flood icing pipe every other kernel then after about 15 minutes go back and pipe the ones you skipped. Right after you pipe those sprinkle with a little black sugar and some sugar crystals you can see the "salt" if you look really close. In real life it shows well. Pipe along the "behind" kernels with the darker golden color and let dry. When they are dry take a caramel color and watercolor the edges to give the darker shadow effect on each side of the cookie.

Sausage links are traditional in a boil also so I made a few of those. I just dotted a reddish color with black and beige to mimic the sausage inside the casing. 

Then I used brown (I got it a bit dark) for my outside cooked casing. 

Let it dry and painted on some black for shadow and beige for highlight.

For the potatoes a reddish brown also and beige. I decided to do potatoes that had been cut in half.

I didn't want my red color to smooth out so I messed with it after I put it on to create the "eyes" 

Then I used brown to watercolor the skin and caramel to watercolor the flesh part.

All done and I just happened to have a piece of fabric that was newspaper print so I used that for my background for the cookies. 

It looks like a pretty sweet crawfish boil to me.