Ladybug Birthday Cookies

These lady bug cookies were for a little girl's first birthday party. Her mom gave me a picture to work from and asked that I add a 1 to the cookie.

Black and red are the hardest colors to use. Red is difficult because it takes more dye to get it the right shade than other colors do. Black icing needs a lot of dye too, and it can bleed onto other colors. For this reason, I did each stage of the cookie in shifts and allowed the icing to dry for 24 hours before I added the details on top.

I added the head and feet after the red body had dried for a day.

I let the head set up for a few minutes, then added the other details.

The white details on the face were added after the black dried overnight. (I thought the ladybugs looked a bit creepy at this point.)

I added the pupils and the 1 after another few hours of drying.

The most difficult thing about these cookies was trying to make them uniform. If I had a ladybug cookie cutter, it would have been easy to make sure every ladybug was the same size and shape, but free-handing the shape on a round cookie was a challenge.

I think the faces turned out pretty cute, and I'm so relieved that the colors did not bleed. All that patience and planning was worth it.

After the cookies were completely dry, I packaged them in individual bags and tied the tops with a coordinating ribbon.

I hope the birthday girl liked her cookies!