These Super Mario Mushroom cookies are super tasty and are cuter than a button mushroom to boot! They involve a bit of pound cake with a brightly iced, melt-in-your mouth, shortbread-like cookie top.

Step 1: Assemble Your Ingredients

Ingredients for the Mushrooms' Body and Top

    1 cup butter (two sticks...yes, two sticks!)
    1/4 cup powdered sugar
    1/2 cup pecans (walnuts or hazelnuts work as well)
    1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
    1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
    1/4 teaspoon salt
    Pound cake (a frozen loaf is fine, that's what I used)
    Black decorator’s gel
    Red and green food coloring
    White frosting or white fondant

Ingredients for Royal Icing (Using Egg Whites)

    1 3/4 cup powdered sugar
    1 teaspoon lemon juice
    1 egg white

I used the above recipe, but if you have young 'uns in your household, you may want to try the below recipe for royal icing instead:

Ingredients for Royal Icing (Using Meringue Powder)

2 cups powdered sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons meringue powder
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 warm water

Hot Tip: As with all things involving royal icing, there will be long drying times. If you’d rather do these recipe in two parts (which is what I did), the top part of the cookie can be made the day before and stored in an air tight container. Then you can do all the frosting fun the following day.

Step 2: Create the Shortbread-like Cookie Top

To start off the cookies, beat together the softened butter and sugar until the mixture is fluffy and looks like mayo.

Once you have your bowl o'mayo, add the vanilla extract.

Next, mix in the salt and flour until everything is well combined.

Add the pecans (or whatever nut makes your skirt fly up) and stir.

Wrap up the dough in plastic wrap and pop in the fridge for a hour or so for it to firm up. Cooling the dough isn’t required, but it does make the ball forming a tiny bit easier. And isn't life hard enough to not have to fight with sticky dough?

Step 3: Bake the Cookie Top

Once you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F.

Form into one inch balls and place on a cookie sheet.

While baking, they’ll flatten out a tiny bit to give the mushroom top shape.

Bake for about 15 minutes, until the cookies are firm and the bottoms are golden brown. Allow the cookies to cool.

Step 4: Create the Stem of the Cookie Mushroom

Creating the bottom part of the mushroom is easy!

Grab a circular cookie cutter that’s a little smaller than your baked cookies.

Take a slice of pound cake that’s about 1/2″ thick. You'll get about a dozen and half slices out of your pound cake.

If you feel your energy lagging, feel free to test out one of the cookies you just baked! Delicious!

Step 5: Create the Royal Icing

We have the shapes, now we need to decorate!

When you’re ready to make the royal icing, beat the egg white and the lemon juice together for a few minutes. Add the powdered sugar to the mixture until you get a thick icing. If it’s too thick, add a few drops of water.

Lay down some tin foil and coat the sides of the pound cake pieces with the icing. If your icing is too thin, add a bit more powdered sugar to the icing mix.

Allow the freshly iced pieces to dry for about an hour.

Step 6: Decorate the Top of the Mushroom

This next part gets quite fun and messy, so you’ll want a lot of paper towels and a sink nearby!

Divide the reminding icing into two bowls. Dye one green and one red.

Dip the cookies into the icing, making sure to get the tops fully colored. Place the iced cookies on a tin foil sheet. Don’t worry about the icing run-off from the cookies, we’ll take care of that next.

Allow the cookies to sit for an hour.

Step 7: Finish the Cookie Tops

Once the royal icing has set, move the cookies from their rather-messy location over to a clean sheet of tin foil. This way the icing run-off won’t harden to the cookie. If the extra edge icing doesn’t fall off the cookie when you pick it up, knock the edge of the cookie on the counter-top.

The cookies should sit for another 30 minutes to finish hardening, as the icing around the edge of the cookie will still be soft.

To finish the top of the mushroom, draw circles with white frosting or use fondant. I used tiny balls of fondant and pushed them onto the cookie.

Step 8: Put It All Together

To finish the bottom part of the mushroom, draw on eyes with black decorator’s gel.

Whew! Now to finally put them together!

Take a bottom part of the mushroom, add a little frosting to glue the top part on, and then push on the cookie.