• Home
  • About Me
  • Recipe Index
  • Buy My Book
  • Contact Me
    • Information
    • Usage
    • Privacy Policy
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • RSS
    • Twitter

Sweet ReciPEAs

Evil Treats from a Nice Person

  • Baked Goods
  • Love Yourself
  • Tipsy Tuesdays
  • Fur Baby Fridays
  • Travel
  • Entertaining
  • Privacy Policy

Treats and bonus recipes right to your inbox every Wednesday.

Child’s Play

20 shares
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Email

The Food

Once again it is time to throw on my party dress and head out to the blog party. This month’s theme is Kid’s Party and luckily for me one of the ideas I had in my head before this ever came about fit into this category perfectly.

Growing up my mother always made homemade cookies. There were only two types of cookies that she would usually buy from the store. Those were Oreo’s and Circus Animals. Oh how I loved those little pink and white sprinkled blobs that were suppose to be animals. I spend half my time eating them and the other half trying to figure out what animal I was eating. And since when is a hippo a circus animal? So in my quest to find circus animal cut outs that were small, all of them came with an Ark, and well I didn’t want that. So I stumbled across some mini farm animal cookie cutters and quickly snatched them up knowing that I had wanted to give it a go. I have actually been working on this idea for the last couple of weeks, and boy it has stumped me…mostly the frosting that is. Circus animal frosting has caranuba wax and that is what makes the frosting so unique. Well getting my hands on some was going to require me to buy a lot of it in bulk. And though I am dedicated to my blog….I just don’t need that much caranuba wax. So I pretty much gave up on the idea of replicating the taste of the cookie and went for trying to match the asthetics of the cookies.

 

Small cookies lead to big problems. Tiny little cookie cutters leave room for lots of things like beaks to be ripped off when not being careful in tranfering them out of the cutter. I lost many a tail, leg and head today(moment of silence please). Small cookies also lead to standing in the kitchen for hours cutting them out.

I originally had more of an actual animal cracker in mind for my “circus” animals but changed to a sugar cookie when I figured I could not match the flavor of the icing. Both my husband and dog love a good sugar cookie, so I knew I would have no problems unloading them.

 

Sugar Cookie Dough:                                                                   

4 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1 lb, 8 oz  unsalted butter, softened

3 eggs

1 TBSP vanilla extract

7 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 TBSP baking soda

1 TBSP cream of tartar

Preheat oven to 375F.

1. Cream the powdered sugar and butter for at least 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and scrape down the bowl after each egg. Add vanilla and mix for 2 more minutes.

2. Mix in the flour, baking soda and cream of tartar while mixer is on slow speed. Mix till you have a smooth dough. Chill for at least 4 hours before rolling out.

3. Roll out dough and cut using whatever shapes you would like(doesn’t really matter once you throw icing on them, it’s anyone’s guess as to what they are)

*This recipe has been passed around my family for awhile and it has never said how many cookies it will make. I got 4 very large balls of dough out of this batch. And about 180 farm animals.

Icing for “Circus Cookies”

2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk

1 TBSP vanilla

pink food coloring

Whisk the sugar, milk and vanilla together until smooth. Set 1/2 of the icing to the side to remain white. Add pink food coloring to the second half of icing.

To make the ‘Circus” Animals:

Dip on side of cookie into icing. Before icing sets up sprinkle on multi-colored decoration balls. Let sit for about an hour to set up. Once done, enjoy trying to figure out what it is you are eating….that is a cow by the way in the photo below.

 

 

 

 

The Beverage:

 

I never have a problem coming up with the food for Blog Party but the drink recipe always throws me for a loop. I never usually drink mixed drinks( a wine girl myself) and even worse was trying to think of a non-alcoholic drink for the “kiddies” to enjoy. I usually have milk with my sugar cookies, the one exception being Christmas in which I have my sugar cookies with hot chocolate on Christmas morning. So hot chocolate it was, but I didn’t want it to be hot, so I made it frozen, kind of like a shake.

 

Hot Chocolate(that caught a cold)

6 TBSP unsweetened cocoa powder

6 TBSP sugar

2 1/2 cups milk

2 1/2 cups light cream

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Ice

Marshmallows(if the mood strikes you)

Preperation:

Add sugar and cocoa to milk and heat in a sauce pan unitl dissolved. Add the cream and vanilla. Heat until almost boiling. Mix well and let cool. When completely cooled, place “hot” chocolate and some ice cubes in a blender and put on liquify. Pour into a glass or mug of your choice. Sprinkle on some marshmallows….after all this is suppose to be for kids.

 

All text and images on this site have ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Copyright (c) 2006 by Peabody Rudd.

20 shares
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Email

baked goods// chocolate25 Comments

Stay updated!

My culinary concoctions and bonus recipes every Wednesday to your inbox.
Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.

« When life hands you…puff pastry?
Portable Brunch »

Comments

  1. Nazca says

    September 14, 2006 at 12:31 pm

    Hundreds and thousands! That’s what us brits call the multicoloured ball things. Anything with them on brings back memories of… well last weekend 😀

    Reply
  2. Ivonne says

    September 14, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    Those are just too adorable! Thank you for keeping the baking spirit alive for me this month, Peabody!!!

    Reply
  3. Anna Maria says

    September 14, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    Those are the cutest, sweetest little things. It feels good just to look at them.

    Reply
  4. Mary says

    September 15, 2006 at 12:34 am

    Your circus animals will be the life of the (blog) party. How cute! And good call on skipping the caranuba wax.

    Reply
  5. Lisa says

    September 15, 2006 at 2:41 am

    I use to love these as a kid too! I’d never think of trying to recreate them.. how cool is that? Excellent job – I think they look much better than the real thing! 😀

    Reply
  6. Jeff says

    September 15, 2006 at 6:09 am

    Yum! How could you go wrong with hot chocolate??

    Reply
  7. Brilynn says

    September 15, 2006 at 9:11 am

    I used to, (still do…) love trying to figure out what the animals are. When I first saw the “cow” my guess, despite knowing they were farm animals, was bear, and then hippo, but maybe you had planted that second notion in my head with your previous hippo talk.

    Reply
  8. Emmy says

    September 16, 2006 at 4:28 am

    I remember those cookies from when I was a kid too. You did a great job on them. Thanks for your nice comment on my Hello Kitty pumpkin 🙂 Glad I found your blog so I can visit again. I love food blogs.

    Reply
  9. Anna says

    September 17, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    Wow! Those look just like the store-bought kind. I use to love those as well. I think Fuzz would really enjoy making these.

    Reply
  10. Wendy says

    September 18, 2006 at 7:05 am

    Cookies look great! About how long should they bake?

    Reply
  11. peabody says

    September 18, 2006 at 10:33 am

    Wendy- for the little animal cookies about 6 minutes. If you were to make a regular shaped one about 9 minutes.

    Reply
  12. mipmup. says

    September 18, 2006 at 5:33 pm

    circus cookies are my favorite (or *were,* before i was vegan)! great post!

    Reply
  13. Paula Richard says

    October 1, 2006 at 1:45 pm

    Wow! Recreating these cookies, only better with a real sugar cookie and more flavorful icing! Now they will finally, taste as good as they look. Can’t wait to take these to a party.

    Reply
  14. Janet says

    June 23, 2007 at 2:10 am

    Hello! I made your sugar cookies! Mine did not look anywhere near as nice as your circus animals but my tasters LOVED them! You are right on about how much dough it makes….I made them and made them and made some more;-) The first ones I made as you suggested but the second go round I threw all my different colored sugars in a bowl and made a hodge podge to sprinkle on top of the cookies before baking. I sent boxes to California, Florida, and Minnesota. Everyone raved about how great a baker I am. lol I just smiled and told them I got the recipe off your blog! Thanks for a wonderful recipe!

    Reply
  15. Sarah Ryan says

    December 26, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    Your pictures of the cookies are so good. Who did them and can I get your permission to use them?

    Reply
  16. Tina Anderson says

    July 9, 2008 at 7:40 am

    Thanks so much for this awesome site and this recipe. Once I figured out how to read the recipe correctly my second batch of cookies came out delicious. My 2 year old son loves the circus animal cookies from the store. His Grandma bought a bag for him. I love baking so having to buy cookies seemed sinful..LOL. Well, we made these together. The only problem is trying to explain to a two year old not to eat every single cookie after he sprinkled them with the colored dots. I kept saying,”Save some for Daddy please.” It was so much fun and the cookies tasted so much better than that bag Grandma bought him.

    Reply
  17. Anna says

    October 11, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    I read on another blog that melted white chocolate chips could make a good icing substitute. It certainly would harden up plenty waxy and can be easily dyed.

    Reply
  18. Jenna says

    December 27, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Waaah! Mothers Cookies is out of business! and Circus Animals are nowhere to be found. This year has been a bummer, but this blow is just too much.
    Maybe this will assuage my grieving.
    Thanks for your pioneering work in homemade, not storebought.

    Reply
  19. Missy says

    January 2, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    Thank you for this! I was so sad to hear that Mother’s Cookies was going out of business… But now I can make my own, with Hot Chocolate, too! 😀 Thank you, Peabody!

    Reply
  20. Nicole says

    July 18, 2009 at 11:16 am

    do you use one pound and 8oz of butter..a total of 6 sticks??? its confusing on the directions.

    Reply
  21. Isabella says

    March 25, 2013 at 5:17 am

    I’m making the surgar cookies but I’m not sure how many sticks of butter I’m supposed put in????? Plezzzz help!

    Reply
    • Peabody says

      March 25, 2013 at 1:27 pm

      One pound 8 oz of butter. Every stick of butter is 4oz. 16 oz in a pound. So this equals 6 sticks of butter.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Culinary Concoctions by Peabody » 1912(the year Arizona became a state) says:
    February 14, 2007 at 11:59 am

    […] I’ve always thought of Valentine’s Day as a scam….for men that is. It’s made to believe that women are to get flowers, chocolate and diamonds…and what do men get?…a coupon book for “massages”. Joy. Growing up I never celebrated it. Most of my adult years were spent in Arizona and as luck would have it, Arizona’s birthday is also February 14th. And so all you anti-Valentine people I invite you to celebrate Arizona Statehood Day with me. There are not a whole lot of ways to celebrate it, so all I really do is make sugar cookies each year…in the shape of Arizona(yes, they really do make cookies cutters in the shape of Arizona). Now don’t get me wrong, I will make my husband a nice meal(something a little more special than a regular Wednesday night meal). I bought him a card and will write something mushy. I bought him some of his favorite candy, all in the obligatory heart shape. But that is it, and that is all I will get too. And that is great because I don’t need a day to remind me how much I love my husband or vice versa. Happy Arizona Statehood Day! […]

    Reply
  2. Culinary Concoctions by Peabody » Goodbye dear friend… says:
    October 10, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    […] So today I pull out from the archives. My attempt when I first started out with this blog to make my own version of Circus Animals. I never got the flavor right, but I got them looking pretty close to the real thing. In my […]

    Reply
  3. Sugar Cookies! | thimbly things says:
    October 14, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    […] yummies were inspired by this recipe.  When I realized I didn’t have enough powdered sugar, I found this recipe (which has a […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Welcome

Hi I’m Peabody (yep, that’s my first name) and welcome to my site! Here you will find a whole lot of yummy recipes (mostly baking and dessert), positive body image promotion, telling it like it is, and the random things that make up my life. Thanks for stopping by! Read more...

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Popular Categories


Baked Goods


Love Yourself


Tipsy Tuesdays


Furbaby Fridays

Here’s what I am up to on Instagram…

This error message is only visible to WordPress admins

Error: No feed found.

Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Baked Goods
  • Love Yourself
  • Tipsy Tuesdays
  • Fur Baby Fridays
  • Travel
  • Entertaining
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 Sweet ReciPEAs/Culinary Concoctions By Peabody Site by Beneficial Studio

20 shares