How to Make Elephant Cookies

It’s always nice when you can use a cookie cutter for multiple designs. Not only does it give you more bang for your buck, it also helps keep your cookie cutter collection a little less crowded. That’s a major plus for me, and those with small living spaces. As I was sketching the cookie cutter design for these elephant cookies, almost immediately I saw other animals hidden in its shape. Like koalas!

Technically speaking, I’m not sure elephants and koalas share the same natural habitat, but they are both adorable creatures so including them together in this set makes total sense to me. Here’s how you can make your own elephant cookies, along with koalas, using the same cookie cutter.

Elephant Cookie Cutter

As mentioned above, this new elephant cookie cutter was just added to my shop.

It's designed to cut out sturdy and solid cookies, while remaining general in shape. This leaves plenty of room for other animal design interpretations. The elephant cookie cutter is available in regular and large sizes. The cookies showcased in the pictures of this tutorial were made with the LARGE size cutter.

Template for Koala & Elephant Cookies

These elephant cookies are fairly simple to decorate. However, the facial details can be a bit tricky to nail down. Hopefully, with the help of this downloadable template, I can help make the decorating process a bit easier.

In this PDF template, I have included all the designs seen in the pictures of this tutorial: the elephant design, as well as the koala, and the tropical leaves.

You can download the elephant cookie template HERE.

If you have a Kopykake or Pico projector, just print it out (or pull it up on your mobile device) and you are good to go. For those without a projector, follow the suggested steps below by tracing the design onto the cookie with an edible food marker.

The Decorating Process

To make these elephant cookies, you will need the following suggested colors:

• Pink medium consistency royal icing. (I mixed Americolor Coral Red with a touch of Americolor Ivory.)
• Gray piping and flood icing. (I used Americolor Stone, but a touch of black would work too.)
• Darker Gray piping and flood icing. (I mixed Americolor Stone from above with a tiny touch of black.)
• White medium consistency icing. (I used Americolor Bright White.)
• Black piping icing. (I used Americolor Super Black.)

Step 1

For those without a projector, mark guidelines where the center head and body should be, as shown. I made a template with template plastic from the PDF file above and used a food marker to draw the guideline on the cookie.

Step 2

With pink icing, fill in the ear sections. Let that icing set (about 15 minutes). Then, with gray icing, fill in the center body section, as shown. Let this dry completely (about 1 to 2 hours).

Step 3

Once the body had time to dry, outline and fill the head & trunk section. This shape is a little tricky, so using the template guide for reference is recommended.

Also, fill the feet sections with the darker gray icing. Let this icing dry again (another 1 to 2 hours).

Step 4

Next, add the top of the ear details with gray icing, and add the middle toenails with white icing.

Follow up next with the line details of the trunk and the arms (or feet?). Let the icing set.

Step 5

Lastly, add the final details such as the eyes, the eyebrows, and the remaining toenails.

Video Tutorial

The steps above are summarized in the time-lapsed video below.

As mentioned before, this elephant cookie cutter works great for koala cookies as well. You can find the koala design template in the PDF template file.

To accompany the elephant cookies and the koala bears, I included tropical leaves and a Wild One banner to complete the set. The leaves were made with this chubby leaf cutter, and the banners were made with this ribbon flag cutter.

To make the tropical leaves, I followed this fun leaf tutorial by Sweet Sugarbelle. They were super easy and quick to to recreate. They are the perfect filler cookies for any animal or safari related party themes.

I have a few more ideas for this cookie cutter, which I am excited to release in the coming weeks. So be on the look out for more designs to come. I hope everyone is having a great week!