Totoro Cookies

When I saw my sister over spring break, she showed me her newly painted totoro nails and I thought it was the cutest thing ever.

f you don’t know who Totoro is, he’s this furry cartoon character from a Studio Ghibli (Japanese) movie called well... My Neighbor Totoro haha So I got this idea to make totoro cookies since my nail painting skills are terrible. The base is a simple sugar cookie recipe but making the colors for the icing and painting the cookies was the hard part. Luckily, my cousin was here visiting this past weekend so I had some help.

Sugar Cookie Recipe adapted from allrecipes... I basically just halved the recipe since I thought 60 would be way too many

-3/4 cup (6 tbsp) butter, softened
-1 cup sugar
-2 eggs
-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
-2.5 cups flour
-1 tsp baking powder
-1/2 tsp salt

Sift together the dry ingredients and set aside
Cream together the butter and sugar
Add eggs and vanilla extract
Slowly add in the dry mixture, mix well
Refrigerate dough for at least an hour or overnight (I recommend overnight to its easier to roll out later)

When the dough is ready to use, roll it out to between ½ and ¼ inch thick. Now came the hard part of trying to cut it to look like Totoro since I don’t think they make cookie cutters shaped like Japanese cartoon characters haha Good thing my cousin is a pretty good artist so she was the one that did the cutting/shaping.

Once the cookies are cut, bake at 400 for about 8 min
Cool the cookies completely before icing them

Icing recipe also adapted from allrecipes... I doubled the recipe to make sure I had enough

-2 cups powdered sugar
-2 tbsp milk
-1 tbsp light corn syrup
-1/2 tsp almond extract

Mix all the ingredients together until you have the desired consistency.... if its too thick, add more milk and if its too thin, add more powdered sugar.

To make Totoro, you need 3 colors, white, black, and grey/light blue. White you already have, black food coloring you can buy at the store so the only color you actually have to make is the grey/light blue. There’s no exact recipe when making a color... its usually trial and error, this time, I used one drop of black and 2 drops of blue and it came out perfectly.

I used small spatulas to paint the larger parts... white for the body and grey/light blue for the head. For the eyes and black lines on the stomach, I put the icing into ziploc bags and cut a whole at the corner (ghetto piping haha) but it works! 

These cookies were definitely a lot of work... not sure if I’ll be making them again anytime soon haha