Graduation Cookies

Graduation Cookies Tutorial

Remember last year? I had just moved back to the good old US of A and had nearly zero belongings. My household furnishings consisted of a card table, 2 folding chairs, and a pot. I slept on a blanket on the floor and used my cell phone as an alarm clock, night light, and emergency weapon at 3 in the morning when my neighbor's cat knocked over a bucket in their backyard. I was making cookies with a grocery bag full of cutters my aunt had loaned me and some Ziplock bags. (As it turns out... more than a year later...I still haven't returned those cutters. I'm a bad person.) (Not entirely true. My aunt said they could stay and play for awhile longer. She'll come visit them if she gets lonely. She's a fantastic aunt like that.)

Graduation Cookie Tutorial

My whole point here is that I made cookies like these last year. And never posted them. And I wasn't worried about it because who in their right mind would make graduation cookies with a blue ribbon cutter and a football cutter?

How to make graduate cookies

And then I purchased a set of graduation cutters and realized.... the shooting star and diploma were actually kind of perfect for these little graduates.


Cut out one diploma and one shooting star. Then cut off the bottom of the shooting star with the bottom of the shooting star cutter. (Could that possibly be any more confusing? Please see image above to actually understand what I'm trying to tell you.) And then cut a piece out of the diploma with the bottom of the shooting star cutter as well. Push the pieces together and bake. (To read about why I cut the dough to be interlocking... CLICK HERE.)

1. Use a 17-count icing for everything on these cookies. Start by piping a vaguely diamond shape at the top in a school color and a diploma shape at the bottom in white. Let dry for an hour.
2. Pipe a wonky shaped face with skin-tone icing. Make sure to add ears even though they look totally ridiculous right now. Let the diploma dry for at least 3-4 hours before moving on to the next step.
3. Add some hair. Make it crazy hair if you like. Then pipe on half of the bow and the opposite bow string with another school color. Let it dry for 15-20 minutes.
4. Finish the bow. Pipe a tiny dot for a nose 2/3 of the way down the face. Pipe some tiny little fingers on the edge of the diploma, leaving space in the middle for another finger. (This is starting to sound surprisingly creepier than graduation cookies have any right to be.) Pipe some little black dots for eyes. Let dry for another 15 minutes or so.


Add the middle fingers and then finish off with whatever details you deem necessary. I also added some pink luster dust (claret colored technically) for the cheeks after I took this picture. You can do that too if you want. Or not. I used thick piping icing for the tassel and the diploma outline. You can use white food coloring or white icing for the white dots in the eyes. I used a food color marker for the eyebrows because I'm always afraid of getting scary-man-eyebrows if I use icing. (And by that I mean that I don't want the eyebrows of a scary man, but by that I also mean that I don't want man eyebrows that are scary.)


Graduation Cookies


If you don't have any graduation cutters, you can still totally make these with an award ribbon cutter and a football cutter. Just make sure that you squish the football cutter a little bit first so that it at least somewhat approximates a diploma shape.

Graduation Cookies

NEED MORE?

And for those hard to make colors -- I've got you covered with plum, black, and red.
Learn how to "think outside the cutter" with my CRAFTSY CLASS.

FTC Disclosure: Some links are affiliate links. That means at NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU...if you click through and make a purchase, I earn a small commission. Don't worry though, I only link to things I love and would recommend to my grandmother.

Georganne
Georganne

This is a short biography of the post author and you can replace it with your own biography.