How to Make Valentine Bumble Bee Cookies

"Would you bee mine, Valentine?" That pun has been a Valentine's Day classic for as long as I can remember. Thinking back to 2nd grade (circa 1989), I remember having a blast with one art class assignment. It was of a paper bumble bee carrying a heart that we had to glue-stick together. Now the more I think about it, it was kind of lame. However, my seven-year-old self thought it was (in 80s terms) like totally rad.

Continuing the theme from my last post of reusing existing cutters for more Valentine's Day ideas, I wanted to try to recreate that paper bumble bee grade-school project into cookie form. Here's a fun tutorial for sitting bumble bee cookies that you can make using the elephant cookie cutter again!

Cookie Cutter for the Bumble Bee Cookies

A few weeks ago, I debuted a design for elephant cookies. As a recap, the cookie cutter for those elephants, shown below, was already pretty versatile.

I showed in that post the cookie cutter could also be used for a koala bear design. Well, this time around, I want to demo how this same cookie cutter can be used to make these adorable sitting bumble bee cookies.

Template for the Bumble Bee Cookies

These bumble bee cookies are fairly simple to decorate. However, the body details with the stripes can be a bit tricky to nail down. This template should be able to help guide you through the decorating process.

You can download the bumble bee 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

What's great about these bumble bee cookies is they don't require a lot of icing colors to mix up. Just three will do. You can see below that I opted for brown instead of the more standard black for a bee. That was just to achieve a more softer contrast with the yellow. Feel free to use black and yellow for these bees if you wish!

To make these sitting bumble bee cookies, you will need the following suggested colors:

• Yellow medium consistency royal icing. (I mixed Americolor Egg Yellow with Americolor Ivory.)
• Brown piping and medium consistency icing. (I mixed Americolor Chocolate Brown with Ivory.)
• White piping and medium consistency icing. (I used Americolor Bright White.)

Step 1

For those without a projector, mark guidelines where the center body should be, as shown. Then mark around the jaw and hair line. 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

Next, fill in the head area with yellow icing. Quickly add the hair detail with brown icing. Give the cookie a little shake to smooth out the surface of the head. Then fill in the feet areas with brown icing. Let this icing set for about 20 minutes.

Step 3

Once the head and feet icing are set, add the stripe detail on the belly. First add the darker stripes, let those set for 15 minutes, then add the yellow stripes in between.

Step 4

Next, move on to the wings. Add the upper wings first, let them set up, then add the lower wings.

Step 5

Add the line details, like around the wings. Then add a smiling face.

Step 6

One of the final steps is to add a candy heart. I found these Wilton heart icing decorations at Michaels that were the perfect size. They are a little tough to bite into though. As an alternative, I would probably make these hearts out of fondant if I did them again. Fondant seems to have a softer bite.

Attach the heart candy with a little icing on the back.

Step 7

Add a few fingers on the heart candy, and these bumble bees are done!

Video Tutorial

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

To complement these Valentine bumble bee cookies, I added a few past cookie cutter favorites to finish off the set.

The daisy flowers were made from this cheeky flower cookie cutter .(I used the small size flower for this platter.) The hearts with the "bee mine" message are the chunky hearts found in my shop. And lastly, the beehive cookies were made using an egg cookie cutter. Any egg cutter would do, but for these particular cookies I used this Wilton one.

This might be the last Valentine's Day cookie idea I'll have this year, but I'm already gearing up for Easter. I have a few fun ideas in work so be on the look out for those in the coming weeks.