Get Well Soon Cookies

 

I made these cookies for a friend who was recovering from an operation, after seeing similar 'Get well' selection boxes online. The ones that you can buy are pretty expensive - but very high quality and beautifully decorated. However I wanted to have a go at making my own.

I used a simple sugar cookie recipe like this one here. Cream the butter and sugar then beat in the egg and vanilla.

Finally fold in the flour. Some recipes advise chilling your dough; others don't. Either way it is pretty easy to roll out and cut using cookie cutters.

I wanted my cookies to resemble medical equipment and put on my thinking cap. In the end I bought a cross cookie cutter from Ebay, which I intended to use to make the Red Cross logo; I also used a round cutter to make pills and simply used a knife for the other shapes, which included sticking plasters, a medicine bottle and a nurse's shirt.

I also used a giant heart and some small heart cutters and a bone-shaped cookie cutter. The other shapes at the bottom are intended to look like a pair of crutches, as my friend had an operation on her foot. I should have bought a foot-shaped cookie cutter really!

The cookies only take about ten minutes to bake; allow them to fully cool before you decorate them.

To decorate the cookies I mixed royal icing with a little water; you need a fairly thick consistency. I bought some small piping bags online as I find the smaller bags much easier to work with when piping details. I coloured different bowls of icing using gel food colouring. I also covered some of the cookies with white fondant, which I rolled out then used the shape of the cookie to cut around.

Below you can see the bone, which I left plain but piped the shape around the edge of the cookie with white royal icing. I used the heart cookie cutter to cut out the same shape in fondant which I had coloured pink and stuck the fondant on top with a little royal icing. I did the same for the large heart and piped the words 'get well' on it, which looked perfect until the last minute when the icing started to run! For the bottle, I covered the cookie in white fondant and made a label and lid from pink fondant and piped on some details with royal icing. For the crutches, I covered the cookie in fondant and piped on the design with royal icing. I also made a blue plaster, but the royal icing was a bit runny.

I also made some pills by covering the round cookies in white fondant and piping a line across the middle like you would see on an aspirin tablet.

For the red crosses, I melted some red candy melts and spread them on the cookies. I quite like the way these have turned out, even though they are not perfect!

I packaged the cookies in a box with a get well card and sent these in the post - amazingly they arrived intact! My friend was really pleased to receive them while she was recovering from her operation.