Toby grew up a Bengals fan, and when we got married I became a Bengals fan by extension. It helps that several awesome Georgia Bulldogs now play for the Bengals (including Geno Atkins, Robert Geathers and A.J. Green). And that they signed a previously released player to the practice squad to to the practice squad and then to the active roster to help him pay for his 4-year-old daughter’s cancer treatments. They’re even donating all the proceeds from sales of his jersey to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and pediatric cancer research.

Plus, I really like animal prints.

So for the first Bengals game of the season, I wanted to make some tiger-striped cookies.

 

I should caution you that while you don’t need a great deal of artistic ability to make these, you do need some patience and a lot of time. Baking the cookies themselves is a pretty quick task, but making, coloring and piping the icing always takes way longer than I anticipate. Some of you may be royal icing wizards, so that may not apply to you. But first-timers should set aside a good chunk of time for the decorating process.

Once the cookies are baked and cooled, you’ll need to make a batch of royal icing and divide it into three (unequal) parts and put the black and white versions into piping bags with small-ish plain tips. Outline the footballs in white and the helmets in black (leaving off the face mask part), and draw some tooth-shaped stripes in varying sizes. I tried to make the stripes look similar to the Bengals’ actual helmets, so I positioned them as though they were stretching across the back of the helmet and onto the other side.

 

Once everything was outlined, I thinned out the orange and black icings to about the consistency of maple syrup (though you’ll see later that the orange icing was a bit too thick), then used piping bags and a little paintbrush-like thing I bought at an art store to fill in the orange parts on the footballs and helmets, and the black stripes on the helmets. You can also use a tiny spoon, a small paintbrush or a toothpick to fill everything in.

The orange on the football needs to be pretty dry before you pipe the white laces on top, but I filled the footballs in before the helmets, then piped the white face masks, so the orange was relatively dry by that time. If you find that yours are not, you can also go ahead and clean up everything except the white piping bag and then go back to the footballs.

Once the cookies are decorated, they need to dry for several hours — I usually do them the night before they’re needed, and let them sit out overnight. Then, all you have to do in the morning is put them in a football-shaped plastic bowl and put on your Still jersey.

Who dey!

Cincinnati Bengals cookies
Cutout sugar cookies (Makes about 2 dozen helmets plus about a dozen footballs)
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg (at room temperature is best)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 400F and make sure you have a clean surface ready for rolling out the cookie dough. Line two or three baking sheets with silicone mats or parchment paper.

Using the paddle attachment on a stand mixer (or using a hand-held electric mixer and a large mixing bowl), beat/cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Add flour mixture to the butter mixture about a third at a time, mixing just to combine after each addition. Don’t chill the dough. Gather together about half of the dough and place it on a clean floured surface and roll it out to about 1/8-inch thick (a little thicker is fine). Cut out shapes using cookie cutters dipped in flour. Place the unbaked cookies on the prepared cookie sheets.

Bake cookies until they’re just starting to get golden around the edges, about 6-7 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on pan for a few minutes, then move to a wire cooling rack to cool completely.

Royal icing (Makes more than enough to decorate the results of the above cookie recipe)
1 pound powdered sugar
4 teaspoons powdered egg whites (not reconstituted)
1/3 cup water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
Food coloring gel – I used Chefmaster coal black and Wilton orange)

Place the powdered sugar and powdered egg whites in the bowl of a clean bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on low speed to combine.

Put the water, lemon juice and vanilla in a measuring cup (you don’t have to stir them), and pour into the powdered sugar mixture with the mixer still on low speed.

Once the ingredients are combined, increase speed to high and beat icing, scraping down sides of bowl occasionally, until it holds stiff peaks (this will take about 3 minutes in a stand mixer or 10ish with a handheld). Separate icing into three bowls (one doesn’t need to have as much icing as the other two). Add the food coloring gel to the two bowls with more icing in them, to dye one bowl black and one orange. Keep in mind that the color will darken when the icing dries.

To thin the icing for flooding/spreading: Add water about a teaspoon at a time to icing that is already the desired color. Stir after each addition, adding water until the icing is the consistency of maple syrup. It shouldn’t be super runny, but you can test it by pulling the spoon up a bit and seeing if the stream of iciing from the spoon disappears back into the rest of the icing after a few seconds, or stays distinct.

TO DECORATE: Set the cooled cookies out on cookie sheets so you’ll be able to move them later. Put some of the un-thinned white icing and un-thinned black icing in piping bags with small-ish plain tips. (I usually use a Wilton #3). Use the white icing to outline the football cookies, and the black icing to outline the helmets, leaving an area for the face mask. Use a toothpick to help correct mistakes. While outlining the helmets, also draw a few black tooth-like stripes of varying sizes on the body of the helmet.

Once all the cookies are outlined, put a cap on the white icing bag and set it aside for later. Put the leftover black icing back into the bowl and thin the whole thing, then put it back in the bag. Also thin the orange icing and put it in a piping bag, if desired. Use the thinned orange icing to fill in the footballs and the parts of the helmet that aren’t going to be the stripes or face mask. I usually pipe some orange onto 2 or 3 cookies at a time, then use a small paintbrush-like tool, tiny spoon or toothpick to gently spread the icing to the edges of the outline.

When you’re done with the orange, rinse off your paintbrush/tool and use the thinned black icing and the clean tool (or new toothpicks) to fill in the stripes.

Use the remaining un-thinned white icing to pipe lines on the face mask, and to pipe laces on the (at least partially dry) footballs. Let the icing dry overnight before storing in an air-tight container or serving.