Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are cool with young kids again because of the recent movie.  I received a request to make these cookies for my cousin son's fourth birthday.  I had made a similar set of Ninja Turtles earlier this year, so I wasn't too worried about making these.

I don't own a ninja turtle cookie cutter.  There are numerous places online to get one theses days.  I found an image online I liked and used it.  The template I used was from here.  I sized the image in Photoshop and printed it out.  I cut out the images and used that to hand-cut the cookies.

I outlined the cookies with black piping icing.  Once dry, I flooded the area with green.  I allowed that to dry for 24 hours.  Then I took a food coloring marker and drew in the mask.  I piped the outline with black and then filled it in with the one of the four mask colors.  While the mask icing was still wet, I used black icing to create the line details on side of the mask around the eyes. 

Starting with a black outline and allowing that to dry, I then filled the eyes with white icing.  I could have done the whole eye wet-on-wet technique, but I did not want to risk bleeding.  I allowed the first layer of white to dry, then piped the black pupil.  For the white catch-light, I did use wet-on-wet because the white could not bleed.  The final touch was to pipe the mouth and add a red tongue.

I made a plaque cookie to say Happy Birthday.  I used this cookie cutter.  I drew in the turtle shell with a food coloring marker.  I followed my drawing with black icing.  Then I filled in a few non-touching sections at a time with brown icing, allowing them to dry before filling in more.  Then I filled in the two green sections and piped the words on.

I hope Michael has a great birthday!