Goodbye, Mother's Animal Cookies

Sadly, Mother's Cookies filed for Chapter 11 last week. I'm hopeful that another company will buy the recipe and continue to make the beloved pink and white frosted animal cookies that I love. They remind me of our elementary school days when Penguin's frozen yogurt was a new and exciting novelty. The ultimate treat was a vanilla frozen yogurt with Mother's Cookies broken up and sprinkled on top.

The news inspired to me make my own version. I used a sugar cookie dough recipe. I thought that I had either made a mistake or used a bad recipe because after creaming the butter, sugar and egg as directed and incorporating the flour and baking powder, the dough was very crumbly like sand and did not come together into a "smooth dough" as the recipe directly. I was contemplating adding more butter or egg, but then I remembered from my days of watching Auntie Mable make Christmas cookies that the dough comes together by pressing it into a lump and refrigerating. All those years 0f Christmas baking paid off. I squished the sandy grains together, and the heat of my hands melted the buttery crumbs into a smooth ball. After being refrigerated for about 2 hours, the dough rolled out smoothly.

I didn't have any animal-shaped cookie cutters, so I used my butterfly and star shapes instead. The small cookied baked quickly, and once they were cooled I gave them a quick dunk in some bright pink royal icing and liberally sprinked them with those little rainbow-colored rolly balls. Although they weren't a complete replica of the Mother's cookies, they were crunchy and buttery. Yum!