panda birthday

On New Year’s Eve, I resolved to make fewer cookies in 2014.  I blew it on day two.  It’s not that I don’t love cookie-ing; I’m just worried that it has become my thing.  As in the thing I do.  

Seeing as I couldn’t not make cookies for a whole week, it probably actually is my thing and resistance is pointless.  And if I’m going to do my thing, I want to do it well.  New resolution: make good cookies in 2014.

My colleagues gave me an opportunity to do my cookie thing this week.  The staff threw a panda-theme birthday party for our crazy, wonderful, should-be-in-a-sitcom Managing Director.  Pandas are her thing.  My task was to make cookies (obviously; it is my thing.)

I decided almost immediately that I wanted to incorporate bamboo.  Black and white is a bit monotonous and green gives them a good punch of color.  I used food coloring to paint bamboo onto the cookies.  Here’s a brief tutorial:

Step 1: space the lines.  You can do this with a ruler or with your eyeballs.  Mark a dot in the middle of the cookie and two dots halfway between the center dot and the edge of the cookie.

Step 2: paint the lines.  These lines are ~1 inch long.  Paint the lines a little thicker at the ends, leaving a small space between them.  They do not have to be perfect.  It is bamboo.

Step 3: paint branches.  Alternating sides, paint branches originating at the spaces between the lines.  In the middle of each branch, paint another branch.  Again, they don’t have to be perfect.

Step 4: fill in with leaves.

Done!