Bake Break: Dinosaur Cookies

About two years ago, on a whim, I went to a rummage sale sponsored by the Waldorf school in Shelburne. The offerings available were your typical second-hand fare, lots of ill-fitting clothes, questionable appliances, and so forth, but I did come away with this:

This is a sugar cookie mold. Yes, you read that correctly, a cookie mold. Instead of cutting out shapes with a cutter, you mash the dough into the mold I've always liked dinosaurs, and while I'm especially fond of the parasaurolophus, I like a good old stegosaurus too.

Anyway, this thing had been idling in my kitchen-like spaces for over two years now, but the other week, I finally decided to try it out. After a quick search, I found a sugar cookie recipe designed for molds, and set to work.

First I mixed up the dough, which then needed to be chilled in the fridge to be workable.

Once the dough had chilled, I stuffed some of it into the mold.

Next, I flipped the mold over in anticipation, peeled out the dough, and voila! A dinosaur looked back at me.

I was able to get three dinosaurs out of the dough by the time I was through. After cutting away the excess dough around the spines and so forth, I made a generic cookie with the leftovers. We'll say it's a dinosaur egg.

While the cookies were baking, I used up some leftover butter by mixing up a little chocolate frosting.

Here are the cookies emerging from the oven:

These cookies aren't for the faint-hearted. Here's my hand to give you an idea of their scale.

Finally, I gave each one a little frosting. As I spread the brown chocolate glaze over the cookies, I imagined that the frosting was tar, and that the little dinosaurs had barely escaped a fatal encounter with a pit, only to be subsequently devoured by ravenous, sugar-crazed humans. 

Okay, that sounded more morbid than I had intended.

If you want to try these cookies out for yourself, go to this site for the recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/ceramic-mold-cookies/