Mini Creations – Cacti Cookie People!

Our youngest daughter, Alice, age 4 (nearly 5!), spotted a very cool YouTube video on the iHasCupquake Channel, in her ‘Quake N Bake’ section, on how to make ‘Final fantasy Cactuar Cookies’.

When Alice first told me about the Cacti cookies I had no idea what she was talking about. She woke up talking about them (having seen the video the day before) and telling me all the ingredients I would need to bake them. I listened, but still couldn’t quite picture what the final creation was supposed to be, so asked her to try and find the video again. Later that day, just before we were going to bed, she found it – so of course I had to promise to make them with her the next day!

Well, we didn’t have the same cookie cutter, or any icing pens, but we improvised and added the grated rind and juice of half a lemon for flavour, along with the green food colouring, self-raising flour, caster sugar, margarine and one egg.

After we’d carefully made our dough, rolled it out and cut our cookies, we were ready to pop them in the oven.

I loved watching Alice’s face as she rolled out the dough and careful cut out the Cacti cookies.

She had so much fun playing with the dough and pushing out the little Cacti men from the cutter.

I left her with a chunk of dough to play with for a while and she enjoyed adding a little water to it, in a bowl, to create a real sticky mess!

After all the fun of baking and mess making, I was thankful that Alice took to washing up (along with creating ‘potions’ in the kitchen sink) whilst the baking was taking its precious time.

She was so engrossed in the washing (and bubble making) that she didn’t even notice me take the cookies out of the oven to cool down. By the time she’d finished up at the sink (with a little bit of a helping hand and lots of moping of excess water off the floor), we were ready to stir up the icing sugar with some green food colouring to add our Cacti stripes!

We found a roll of liquorice in the cupboard and used that for eyes. Alice fashioned a belt for her Cacti fella.