Cookie Periodic Table aka. "The Periodic Table of Aliments"

Step 5 Prepare the toppings

Each group on the periodic table is topped with a different flavor of icing or melted chocolate. Before you go whole hog you should experiment with a couple of flavors and find out what you like. The table groups are of wildly differing sizes, so choose your color / flavor combinations wisely. Here are my choices:

(38) Transition metals: white chocolate, peach
(28) Rare earth metals: bourbon spice, green
(15) Halogens: vanilla, blue
(10) Poor metals: chocolate, brown
(6) Alkalai metals: almond, orange
(6) Alkalai earth metals: lemon, yellow
(6) Noble gasses: maple, red

Both the icing and melted chocolate will become hard in a few hours, so don't prepare them until your cookie rectangles are cooled and ready to use. Work with flavors one at a time rather than attempting to prepare multiple toppings in advance.

Icing Recipe:

2 cups sifted powdered sugar
About 3 tbs of cream
Flavoring of choice

Icing is really just powdered sugar wet with a tiny bit of liquid until it forms a paste. To make just sift powdered sugar into a bowl (some powdered sugar brands come quite lumpy and you definitely want a smooth icing), add flavorings, then add cream by the tablespoon full until you get a nice gooey mixture. Be cautious with the addition of cream or it will take a long time to harden up. The finished icing should hold peaks but slowly ooze towards flatness.

If you are using melted chocolate melt chocolate chips in a double boiler, then just apply like icing. One of the most difficult parts of this project was attempting to stack and store all the cookies without damaging the finish, so the time it took the toppings to dry was a huge unexpected problem. Chocolate dries up fastest and hardest, so is by far the easiest to work with. If I was doing it again, I might try using white chocolate as a base for more of the flavors.