In this post , I'm going to be sharing with you some of my best tips for creating gorgeous baby shower sugar cookies. When it comes to baby shower cookies, we all love those pretty pastel cookies that just really convey the sweetness and the precious nature of baby showers. Celebrating a new baby coming into the world at such an exciting time!
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A couple of weeks ago, I got to make baby shower cookies for one of my best friends. She is having her second baby boy and I love getting to be moms together. Now, we've been friends for years and years, and it was such a blessing to get to make cookies for her shower. I'm going to be sharing that process and giving you a tutorial on these super cute Peter Rabbit-inspired baby shower sugar cookies.
And I'm also excited to give you tips and tricks and things that I found work really well for any type of baby shower cookies. You can watch the accompanying video below too, if you'd like!
Cookie Cutters For Baby Shower Sugar Cookies
I like to have some go-to cut shapes that I can come back to again and again. Regardless of the theme of the shower, I know I have these shapes that I can kind of make work with whatever theme I have.
You can grab my favorite set of Anne Clark baby shower cookie cutters here.
These cute little bottles, stroller shape, rattle and onesie are my favorites for baby shower cookies because they're so versatile. No matter what theme you're planning for your baby shower, these come in handy! They have been my go-to ever since I began decorating cookies. The metal is really, really durable and I love that these cut frozen cookie dough so easily. Y'all know I love to freeze my cookie dough already rolled out in sheets.
These are perfect for cutting through that frozen dough when it's in sheets and they make really, really nice crisp edges. So I have this cute baby bottle, and I've used all these different shapes in a bunch of ways, depending on the theme of the shower, you can use different colors, but they all kind of are so useful when doing baby shower cookies.
If you want to learn more about that process or cookie decorating in general, if you're new to the world of decorating cookies, I have tons of playlists on my YouTube channel about how to make the dough, how I freeze it, and my whole process. I also have the cookie classroom, which is a pay-what-you-can course that walks you through the entire process of making decorated sugar cookies with royal icing.
Achieving Color Palettes with Gel Food Coloring for Baby Shower Cookies
Now, something else that I like to do when making baby shower cookies is to create those really pretty pastel color palettes. I know when I do a set of cookies, I usually try to look at the invitation or some of the materials that have been purchased for the party.
Now, usually for baby showers, these are going to be those kind of toned-down, muted pastels.
I achieve those types of colors when I'm coloring royal icing is with neutral tones of gel food coloring. (I've linked my favorites below) Now, when you buy gel food coloring, sometimes you can get it straight from the store or straight online in the color that you want. However, I often used Americolor white, brown, or black to create muted pastels, because sometimes when you use just the color alone will usually have a stronger more candy colored tone.
It's going to be a little bit more bright, like that traditional Easter egg dye and food coloring vibe, but with adding the neutrals, when you add a bit of white or brown or black, I tend to add a bit of white, a bit of brown, and it tones down that color and makes it more of like a baby shower calming color vibe.
How to Make Peter Rabbit Baby Shower Cookies
If you'd like to see a more visual tutorial for these cookies, check out the YouTube video that accompanies this post. That video will help you see exactly how I complete these cookies.
Being close to Easter, the Peter Rabbit theme was so, so cute and fun. So with any type of cookie, say I like to just pick a couple of relevant patterns, for example, a onesie and a rattle or some shapes that I might like.
In this set, I did these little cabbages and I just took some thick consistency, arcing like I would for florals.
If you'd like to learn more about florals, you can go to my video from last week. I just made these little cabbage shapes kind of like I would a rose and then waited for those to dry. Then, I painted them with a green that I mixed from black and yellow gel food coloring with a bit of lemon extract, and painted on the top to make it look like hand-painted cabbages.
Those were so cute! And it's probably some of my favorite cookies I've done in the last little bit. And they got rave reviews, y'all!! So, if you're looking for something easy and quick, then add floral a girls' baby shower or something like that that you can do really quickly and easily and then just add some color to after.
I have done onesies in the past where I've done like lace sleeves florals painted, and patterns on the onesies. I've done a lot of different onesie designs over the years, but these were just simple, easy, and super cute.
I did a few of each color (pale blue and sage green) and started by flooding the cookie with the base color. Once that was dry, I mixed some fresh icing into the colors I'd used to flood to make that icing a bit thicker consistency and piped some details onto the onesies.
And I think it kind of complemented that gardening country feel to have a simple onesie paired with these. Just like those little cabbages, I did a similar technique with the carrots. I just flooded the base white. I used thick icing and a tipless piping bag cut into the shape of a "V" at the end to create some leaf shapes at the top of the carrot. After it was completely dry, I painted over that with some gel food coloring that I had mixed to a kind of muted tone with Wilton orange gel, food coloring and Americolor brown. Then I mix that with again, a bit of lemon or almond extract and painted that like watercolor onto the little carrot cookies.
Now, you don't just have to use baby shower-specific sets or baby shower-specific cookie cutters when creating baby shower cookies. Here in the South, we love a good monogram. If you've ever been to a Southern baby shower and you've seen the ladies walking around the tables looking at all the little smocked outfits to see the little monograms and embroidery, it's just a blast!
It's so fun to get to fellowship with all the ladies in your church and your family and talk about the cute baby clothes that you're going to get to see on the new baby. Just like adorable baby clothes, cookies can be monogrammed.
Anytime I'm doing a baby shower, I love to find out the baby's name if I have a name picked out, or even the last name, you can use the last name as well of the family who has seen the baby shower the family, who's having the baby and create a really cute monogrammed cookie.
And you don't need anything special or extravagant to create a monogrammed cookie. I use this plaque cutter that I've had for a long time. Another Anne Clark set, I have used these plaques more times than I can count.
I flooded this cookie with white icing and then once that was completely dry, created this pattern of watercolor vegetables. I just kind of miniaturized the cabbage and carrot cookies and then added, I'm not sure if this was like a rutabaga or a baby or what, but this is part of one of the inspiration pictures that her mother-in-law sent me.
So I was trying to kind of make it look similar to that as well. But I used a little bit of a darker red tone to create a little beat-looking vegetable. And they don't have to be perfect or look exactly like the vegetable you're trying to create.
I think that's where a lot of people get hung up on creating these surface patterns on cookies. For the background of a monogram like this, they feel like each shape has to be perfect and it doesn't. They're all going to come together to look cohesive you're going to get the feel and the look without each piece being exactly perfect.
For that letter, E on top of the pattern, I'll just use some of that thick consistency, the icing that I've used for the onesies and outline that letter E and then filled it in with a flood consistency icing. Now, I didn't use a projector for this. I do a lot to freehand writing. If you'd like to learn more about writing free hand, check out this video.
When you're only doing three or four cookies, it just doesn't seem worth it to get out the projector when you can create that cute feel without it.
Now, gingham is something that we love here in the South at Baby Showers. We love some gingham-smocked outfits! I thought this would go really well. Some people create this gingham pattern with an airbrush. I've never really had a lot of luck with my airbrush. I like it. I use that occasionally, but I do prefer hand painting. It's just a technique I love , and that's what I did with these cookies since I already had that gel food coloring and extract out from painting the other cookies, I thought it would make it look more cohesive to use that again.
And it was already there, so why not? I flooded these square cookies with white icing. Once again, that's kind of been a benefit of doing these cookies this way. Just having one color to flood everything with made it very simple to start.
When I'm doing watercolors, I like to make sure that my icing has dried for at least 6 to 8 hours because you don't want to put pressure on it with your brush and have your icing breakthrough. You want it to be totally dried through. And I do this by leaving it out in the open air.
A lot of people have comments and concerns about leaving cookies out in the open air. They're not going to get stale if you put the flood on top of the cookie. I just get asked this question a lot, so I want to share it. When you flood the top of the cookie, the icing creates a protective airtight seal on top of the cookie.
Now, some people put these in their ovens and leave a crack. Some people put them on a drying rack. Some people put them on their counters. The important thing to remember is that you want airflow between your cookies. You don't want to flood your cookies and cover them with Saran wrap either way, because that will create weird textures on your cookies when you pull that Saran wraps back to see if they're dry.
And sometimes they won't even dry if there's no airflow in between. So you want to leave those out usually over, not put them in a safe place for, you know, they're going to be okay back in your kitchen on the counter or somewhere safe.
What I do to create this gingham pattern is I just tried to find a flat brush. And I know I can just kind of lay on top of the cookie, So I'll grab a little bit of that color.
And I do like to go a little heavy on the extract to thin this thing out real good to thin the color out real good. And then I'll take the brush and just lay it across as I drag it. And I just try to make it as straight as possible. But with the country garden vibes of this set, I wasn't too worried about it getting out of hand because if it's not perfectly perfect, I think it goes with the set.
So once that was done, I just grabbed some thick consistency, and black icing and wrote Sweet Baby Boy on Top. And I wasn't super happy with my writing on this one. I was regretting not pulling out the projector because I had too much coffee and my hands were shaking, but I still thought the script turned out cute.
And I always just try to get some really good pictures of these baby shower cookies because of the showers, the baby showers, wedding showers, and all that stuff. Those were some of the sets that I got the most referrals from when I was running my cookie business.
And I love having really good pictures. That way I can tag the person with whom I was making cookies and their friends and family can see it on Facebook. Their friends and family see it at the shower itself. And it does help drive referrals for your cookie business.
We do have the Cookie Courier community, which is a Facebook group, especially for ladies who are running their home bakeries without losing their sanity. Learning to grow our home bakery businesses together with guest speakers, special training from me, with resources that I've created over the years that I'll share with you in our community.
Thank you all so much for joining today. I've enjoyed spending time with you here in the kitchen again. And if you have any questions about baby shower cookies, about how to maybe start with a really simple set, if you're just getting started in the cookie world, or how you can up your baby shower cookie game, drop it in the comments below.
I'd love to talk with you a little bit further. Please share any tips that you have for creating great baby shower cookies. I would love to hear from you!
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