If you’ve seen my critter cookie cutter post. I wanted to step it up a notch and make a custom cookie cutter/cookies for my Lion Den for the Pack Christmas Party. Now most people won’t show you their fails. But I feel its important to share your mistakes sometimes to appreciate the end results.

And whats the saying "You got a break a few egg's to make an omelette" (Okay, maybe that doesn't really apply here but hopefully you get my point).

So in the spirit of that, I’m sharing with you an EPIC Cookie FAIL. It started out in the right direction but as you can see through the step process, every next step went just a bit more skewed off the original goal. So buckle up this is going to be a very EPIC FAIL.

Step 1: Design 3D Cookie Cutter & Print Cutter

Now rather than rehash my process of cookie cutter designing, here is a link to my original Instructable post. https://www.instructables.com/id/Critter-Cookie-Cutters/

Continuing from that I imported my custom Lion Den logo and scaled and set the depth to what I thought would be appropriate to leave imprint in the dough (Misstep NO. 1- Was not deep enough)

With the logo centered in the cutter portion I added shallow struts across the logo connecting to the outer cutter. Once I was happy with what I thought would work I had it printed.

Step 2: Make the Dough and Cut the Cookies

Using my Grandma’s sugar cookie recipe I made the dough. Now my initial thought was to make the cookies look similar to my actual Lion Den logo which is Gold and Brown.

So I colored the dough with Yellow food coloring gel. The recipe requires it sit in fridge overnight. After the nights rest in the fridge I rolled out the dough and began cutting out the cookies.

(Misstep NO. 2 - Because the lion face imprint depth wasn’t deep enough I had to re-roll out my dough at a thicker depth than I wanted to get the face to leave and imprint at all).

But it did work somewhat, so I was cautiously optimistic that it might work.

Step 3: Bake the Cookies

Cooking the cookies quickly confirmed my fears.

(Misstep NO. 3 - The thickness of the cookies when baked made the face all but disappear.) But the face was still visible on most the cookies. The bad thing about the cookies being so thick, it makes them be a bit more cakey.)

Step 4: Icing the Cookies...

(Where the wheels come off the bus and sends it crashing down a steep ravine)

My initial idea was to take icing and pipe into the voids. (Misstep NO. 4 - Instead of using my Grandma’s original recipe I thought buying actual frosting would help me with this process better)

WRONG!!! I quickly realized that nope and I’m sorry I don’t have a pic of this portion as I was pretty disgusted. So much so I said %(^#@($## and that was tame to what I really said.

Then went all mad scientist covering the entire cookie with brown frosting. With the hope I could scrape off the excess to leave the brown icing in the voids (Misstep NO. 5 - After the first 2 I tried it was ripping up the dough)

!)&^%⁄·ﬂﬁ€‹$)!⁄— Sorry again no pic of that. So I ended up just slapping all of them with brown frosting.

Oh (Misstep NO. 6 - I didn’t actually use chocolate icing I used white icing and colored it with brown coloring gel.) So on top of them not looking so hot they didn’t even have the benefit of at least tasting better with Chocolate. Sigh!

Step 5: EPIC FAIL Recovery Attempt

After being so disgusted with myself and the fact the Pack Christmas party was only 3 days away. I was ready to give up. I sent a pic of the iced cookies to my daughter, who understandably couldn't help but laugh and said “Dad, Uh those look like Poop emoji’s”. Hanging my head in shame I was ready to throw in the towel.

Then it occurred to me why not embrace the madness. I pulled out the eyes I had left over from my critter cookies and added two eyes to each. Then using the white icing, I added a streak at the bottom of each for smile to complete the effect.

Now before I start getting tons of hate mail, questioning how could I possibly serve poop emoji cookies to young impressionable Lion Scouts, I didn’t. Even though everyone said they’d probably love them. But some how I doubt the parents would.

So, they’ve gone into the freezer for the time being. Maybe they’ll come out for an Adult themed April Fools day party some day. When I showed my daughter the alteration she said “At least your a good sport”.

So I’m not done with this. I plan to retool and try again.

Oh well, I just felt I should share the fail to at least show you things to change for the next time around.

I hope you enjoyed my embarrassment and this helps you to avoid these pitfalls, or inspire you to try, cause you never know til you try.