non-bento#3 Raving Rabbid cookies

After making the rabbid cookie cutter, I decided to actually try using it to make some cookies!

non-bento#3: Raving Rabbid cookies
Created and eaten on: 11/18/2008 and 11/19/2008

For cookie batter, I searched for a recipe on a Japanese cooking site. Something easy and not too sweet. I found a recipe with just pancake mix and butter. No eggs! No milk! No sugar! (You don’t need to add sugar, because pancake mix already contains some sugar.)

I used wheat pancake mix instead of normal pancake mix, because that was what I had. 😛 I had bought it loooong time ago, because it was on sale at a Japanese supermarket but I just never used it.
I made two different kinds of cookie dough. One with just wheat pancake mix dough and one with wheat pancake mix and cocoa.

After mixing the dough, I put it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so. While the dough was setting in the fridge, I made a cookie cutter for the rabbid’s mouth and stomach. This wasn’t hard at all. It took less than 10 minutes.
Then I took the dough out of the fridge and flattened it with a rolling pin. The recipe said it’d expand, so I made it 1/4 inch thick. In retrospect I probably could’ve made it thicker. Maybe because I used wheat pancake mix, and not normal pancake mix, it didn’t expand that much.

After I flattened the dough, I used the rabbid cookie cutter and started cutting out the dough with it. Then I used the cookie cutter for the mouth and stomach to cut out the wheat pancake mix with cocoa. I cut teeth for each rabbid, and put eyes on each rabbid. This took a very very long time… after all cookies were ready, I baked them for about 20 minutes and they were done!

If you look closely, there are two different kinds of rabbid cookies.

The ears, arms and legs came out darker because they were smaller than the body, so they baked faster than the body. But they weren’t burnt as they look. I tried two different ways to put the mouth on rabbids. I think just putting the mouth on top of body looked better. (rather than cutting the mouth out, and inserting cocoa dough in.)

I couldn’t use all the dough that day, so next day, I baked rabbid cookies again with their mouth closed. And this time, I also made plungers! I took them to work both times, and people seemed to enjoy them. 🙂  Like I mentioned, these cookies weren’t sweet, so you could have a lot of them without feeling guilty.

Plunger cookies!!!

Some people commented that they want to see my rabbid cookie cutter, so I decided to post some pictures of it.

Ta-da!

I kept putting the cookie cutter in the guide as I bent

I used a store bought cookie cutter to make this one, so one side of the edges was folded in, and made it harder to bend it. As someone already suggested, you can use aluminum flashing to make a cookie cutter. It’s probably a lot cheaper and easier to work with, but the cooking supply store was closer than a hardware store… (I’m lazy like that. :P) The cookie cutter I bought wasn’t that expensive either. I believe it was 99 cents each.

Cookie cutter I used to make the rabbid cookie cutter (top left), the pliers I used (top right), the guide I used (bottom left), finished cookie cutter with mouth (bottom right)

Check out my awesome tool. A pair of pliers without a grip cover! (I forgot to put a chopstick in the shot though.) I always try to make do with what I have, and things usually come out better than when using fancier tools. I did buy needle nose pliers right after this, but I haven’t used them yet. I’ve seen some people make cookie cutters out of disposable aluminum containers, so there are many ways to make your own cookie cutter.

Maybe I’ll do a how-to on this, but I’m not really sure if it’ll be that helpful or interesting, because it’ll be just me bending a cookie cutter, using a guide… Actually, I’m trying to think of a way to make a cookie cutter easier. Something that doesn’t require you to have any special tools. But until then, DAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! 😀

Raving Rabbid cookies:
– pancake mix
– butter

For more pictures of my bento, visit Bento! set and Bento details! set on my flickr page.