"Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic"

For my sister Catherine's baby shower, I got the idea to make a cookie lollypop centerpiece. Unfortunately, I couldn't recall where I got the idea from (I think it was from a Martha Stewart Magazine), but I remembered the article suggested sticking cookies into a basket or trough of wheat grass. Catherine has decorated her boy's nursery with an animal theme, so I thought it would be cute to make teddy bears dancing in the grass (anyone know that song - Teddy bears picnic?)

The project took a whole week starting from hunting all over Fairfax for an appropriate container to grow the wheat grass in, and finding wheat grass seeds. I was finally able to find a super cute white wicker basket at a garden center close to my house and the seeds at our local Whole Foods market.

I soaked the seeds on Monday morning, planted them that evening, and crossed my fingers hoping that the grass would be the right height by Saturday's shower.

Since I lost track of where I saw the cookie centerpiece article, I had to search the web for directions on making cookie lollies. I found this wonderful website called cakejournal.com that has great tutorials on making and decorating cookies and cakes.

Here are some photos and descriptions of the centerpiece making process:

1) Making the cookie dough. The recipe from cakejournal.com listed ingredients in grams. I was too nervous to convert the measurements, so I used a "No Fail Sugar Cookies recipe".

Cutting cookies

2) Cookie lollypops. I followed the instructions on the Cookie Lolly tutorial to bake the cookies onto skewers.

3) Royal Icing. I did research on several sites and found that universally, people suggest making royal icing for decorating sugar cookies. Royal icing has sugar, lemon juice and egg whites. On its own, the taste was pretty horrible, so I decided to make brown bears and added cocoa powder to the icing for color and taste.

4) Icing the cookies. I followed the "how to flood cookies with royal icing" tutorial to decorate the bears. Unfortunately, the piping set I have only has a size 5 tip so the outlines were thicker than I had hoped, making the bears look more rustic and less delicate. I am also a clumsy lefty with terrible penmanship, so the outlining was probably one of the hardest culinary challenges I've ever attempted.

Outlined bears.

Flooded teddies

Bleeding chocolate

6) Decorating the Bears. After the outlining fiasco, I knew I was not skilled enough to add any intricate details to the bears (little faces, hands, feet, bowties, etc) so to make my life simpler, decided to decorate the cookies with colored polka dots. I used food coloring to make 2 different shades of green (that matched Catherine's shower invitation that I had purchased from tinyprints.com) and used the back of a skewer to dip colored icing onto the brown bears.

7) The Final product. The morning of the shower, Sophie helped me stick the bears into the basket of wheat grass. I was so glad that the grass and grown to exactly the right height!