It feels a bit odd to call this "part 1" as this saga has been going on for a while now. This is just the first time I'm formally recording it.
For Christmas 2021, I made these zebra isopod (Armadillidium maculatum) gingerbread cookies:
They did pretty well online. It was a relatively novel concept; there hadn't been many isopod gingerbread cookies on the net before this, and none that I could find were side views.
Why? Because there were no isopod cookie cutters, so you have to cut out each of those 7 little legs with a knife for every single isopod cookie you make. And boy, did I make 'em!
I made a template out of paper (that wasn't very durable, so I had to make a few) and traced it onto the gingerbread dough each time. The dough was rolled very thinly so the bake time would only be about 5 minutes, short enough to keep the legs and antennae from burning. Thin dough warms up more quickly outside of the oven too, so I had to keep re-chilling it or my isopods would stick to the parchment paper, warp, and fall apart before making it into the oven.
I think I can be forgiven for using a store-bought mix.
But I was determined to make my own cookie shapes. I have a handful of non-traditional cookie cutters, including dinosaurs and Bigfoot, and they're plenty of fun, but no amount of icing does away with the feeling of limitation and that I'm piggybacking off the work of the cookie cutters' designers.
Christmas 2025, I roped my dad into decorating some gingerbread, the results of which my mom described as "子どものお手伝いみたい"
That's why I went for the paper template method. It works, but it's a pain, and I'm not keen to try it again. Making my own cookie cutters could be a viable option for a future batch, though. There are tons of tutorials for making cookie cutters! Most assume you're not looking to make anything more intricate than a heart, but there are instructions and even kits for making cookie cutters with strips of metal and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Cookie cutters can be 3D printed as well, but that's where you run into food safety problems; while the PVC used may be food-safe, the structure of the finished product renders it single-use. Some people get around this by placing cling wrap over the dough and pressing the cookie cutter into the covered dough, but this dulls the cut, and the cling wrap is prone to tearing.
Then there's another issue: I don't like icing cookies. Just making cutout cookies tends to be a 2-day affair because I let the dough chill overnight before working with it, so waiting for the cookies to cool after baking, then dry after icing can add another day. The icing process itself is tedious and prone to unfixable mistakes, so as much as I enjoy watching videos of people decorate cookies, it's just not something I have much patience for myself.
So the whole concept went on the backburner until shortly before this past Christmas, when I watched an episode of マツコの知らない世界 on Christmas cookie and snack tins. The tins in the show were sold by bakeries and other food manufacturers, but it got me wondering: could an individual design and order a small run of custom tins to fill with custom cookies and give to friends and family? Is there a company that makes tins in set sizes that it will print custom designs on?
The short answer is no. No one has a minimum order quantity below a few hundred.
Let's put a pin in that idea.
Even if we can't get custom tins, we can still make custom cookies to put in generic tins, right? And some of the cookies you see in store-bought tins have some pretty elaborate designs. They have to be mass-producing those somehow...
That's when I learned of cookie molds. They're standard in a number of European cookie recipes: springerle in Germany and Switzerland, speculoos in the Netherlands, pryaniki in Russia, and sometimes for gingerbread and shortbread, among others. Here in the USA, the most notable source of cookie molds is probably Brown Bag Designs.
Image stolen from their gallery, I hope they don't mind
Brown Bag's stoneware molds were designed by Lucy Ross Natkiel from the 1980s to the 2000s and manufactured by Emerson Creek Pottery, which bought Brown Bag Designs in the 2010s and still sells cookie stamps and shortbread pans under its name. I'm not sure if they still use Lucy's designs, but many of her now-vintage molds are in thrift stores and on eBay. There doesn't appear to be a complete official list or catalog of Brown Bag Design's products, but collector Sherri Farley of Little Cabin Creations has a good list.
What intrigued me most about Brown Bag's cookie offerings was their line of cookie stamps from the 1990s. The stamps still being manufactured today are all ceramic with glazed, solid-colored handles, but these had decorative resin handles. And they're REAL nice to look at.
Cookie molds seemed like a viable way to make custom cookies and a GREAT way to avoid having to decorate them after baking. Replace the stoneware or wood with food-safe silicone and they'll be easier to use and easier to make. I picked up 3 vintage Brown Bag cookie stamps and a "Cut-Apart" cookie mold from eBay, partly for research, and partly because they're so dang appealing in their own right.
The resulting cookies come out very nicely if you make them according to the official Brown Bag recipe book. The recipes that came with the different types of molds were the same, but the instructions for using the stamps are slightly different: don't chill the dough beforehand, roll it into 2-inch balls, and then stamp.
I've found this works best if you lightly flour the dough balls before stamping. You don't want to skimp on size of the dough balls or the cookies might come out too thin and crunchy. The cut-apart mold works fine with unchilled dough as well, but I throw the whole tray of stamped and demolded cookies into the freezer before baking to help them retain their designs.
The intent is to leave the edges of the stamped cookies ragged, but the designs fit perfectly inside a 3-inch round cookie cutter if you prefer clean edges.
I've made three attempts with shortbread so far. One barely kept its shapes in the oven, the next was far too crumbly to work with due to the sugar I used (I opted to freeze the dough as a thick rope and cut it into discs instead). They were the best-tasting, but this isn't about taste. This is about making nice-looking cookies using the least amount of effort possible. The third was... acceptable. But everything had to be VERY thoroughly floured, and I only managed this with the stamps, not the mold. The resulting cookies were a little too big for their richness, so a smaller design might work better.
The important thing is that I now have an idea of how cookie molds should work, I have a few recipes that I know will work with them, and even if my quest to design my own cookie molds should fail, I won't have to use icing just to make a nice-looking batch of cookies.
The next step will be to figure out how to make some food-safe masters. This has already proven to be a bit of a doozy, but I'll leave that for next time.
For now, here's Pepperkakebakesang from Dyrene i Hakkebakkeskogen, a song that tells you how to make gingerbread cookies, but only if you remember the lyrics correctly.
