Last May my friend was having her son’s baptism.  I was helping her look for centerpiece ideas and we both loved the centerpieces made out of cookie pops.  Not only do they make cute centerpieces, but at the end of the party everyone takes a cookie and you have your favors taken care of as well.  Plus, it’s a cookie on stick – what’s not to like about that?  Well… there is one thing.  The price!!  Fifty, sixty bucks for ONE centerpiece!  Obviously that wasn’t going to happen so I said, “We can make them for WAY less than that!”

Now, I’d never made a cookie pop in my life and my only previous experience with making any type of decorated cookie resulted in some slightly sloppy (but still cute!) Pac-Man Cookies.  How hard could it be though?  You cut out your cookie shape, put a stick in it and bake.

Well, for the most part it really was that easy!  We decided to do angels and crosses.  My friend got the cookie cutters, and the only real snafu was that the cross cutter made cutouts too small to be sticking sticks in.  In the end I think that worked in our favor because we wound up making crosses out of blue melting chocolate instead and they made a nice contrast against the angel cookies.

I knew from my Pac-Man cookie experience that I would need an icing with a little thicker consistency to decorate the angel cookies and the good old internet told me that royal icing was the way to go.  So I whipped up a batch using the recipe from the container of Wilton Meringue Powder that I bought and got to work.  I’m definitely no artist, so all I did was trace the outline of each section (head, wings and body) and then filled them in.  Being only my second attempt at doing a decorated cookie I had yet to learn about the technique called flooding which makes a much smoother finished product (more on that later!) so they were a little lumpy looking but other than that I thought they came out great.

I used an edible color marker to draw on the face, then wrapped each cookie in individual cellophane bags.  For the base of the centerpiece I had purchased little white square buckets from Oriental Trading Company.  I put a foam craft ball in each bucket and then stuck the cookie pops and chocolate pops into the foam.  To cover up what you could see of the foam ball I used some green tissue paper and green gem stones.  Here is the final product…

Not bad for not spending a fortune, eh?