Cookie Quest, part 2: Katabasis

So continues my quest to find an easier way to decorate cookies, so my cookies don't keep coming out like this:

I'd concluded that the way about it is with cookie molds. Having played around with a few vintage cookie molds, it's now time to try to make my own.

Making a custom cookie mold is simple in theory: create a master that looks like the cookie you want, then take a negative cast of it. That negative cast is your cookie mold.

But you can't just make the master and cast out of anything. Part of working with food is making sure the tools you use are safe to come in contact with food. You don't want to use cadmium-laden plates or ladles that leech carcinogens. There are surprisingly few materials that are graded as safe to come in contact with food, even fewer that you can easily make at home without specialized equipment.

Silicone is an easy pick for the negative. There are many DIY silicone products on the market that are FDA-compliant, and many, such as Alumilite's, advertise this aspect. It's not rigid enough for cookie stamps or springerle, but the flexibility should make the dough easier to demold. The ease of making silicone molds also means it's easy to make many to give as gifts or sell. Uncured silicone can react with some materials commonly used to make masters, though, so you have to make sure that everything is compatible.

The master is where it gets a bit tricky. Polymer clay, namely Sculpey or Fimo, would seem the easy choice; it's durable, easy to use, easy to come by, and non-toxic. I've even come across people who make custom silicone cookie molds using Super Sculpey, the clay I have the most experience with.

Just normal sculptures

However, no polymer clay, even cured, is considered food-safe. One reason for this is that the cured clay is porous, so it's difficult to clean thoroughly and will harbor bacteria with repeated use. This isn't so much a problem for this application; the master won't come in contact with food and its porosity won't transfer to the silicone. The other reason is that polymer clay is made of plastic polymers. While it's safe to handle with your hands, it's not known how much will shed or what components might leach into wet or acidic materials.

I tried asking Alumilite and Sculpey about this. Sculpey never got back to me, but here's what Jess from Alumilite had to say:

Even if the silicone/putty itself is labeled food-safe, we can’t guarantee the finished mold is food-safe if it was made from a master that isn’t food-safe (like polymer clay). Some materials can transfer residue into the mold during curing.

If you’re making cookie stamps or chocolate molds, the safest route is to start with a food-safe master (like acrylic, sealed wood, or another food-safe material).

If you really want to use polymer clay, we’d recommend fully curing it and sealing it with a food-safe coating first before making the mold but for chocolate molds especially, we’d still suggest using a food-safe master when possible.

Thank you, Jess! (I asked about chocolate too, as I've been wanting some chocolate isopods)

What it sounds like is that polymer clay is such a diverse category of materials and this is such a niche application that it's simply not reasonable for a silicone mold company to have tested this. A layer of a food-safe finish meant for wood might help, but it's hard to guarantee total coverage, especially with something so small and ornate. It's entirely possible that this is all perfectly safe, but it could also be a fantastic way to increase your brain's microplastics content.

The only clays that are guaranteed food-safe are ceramics. The most accessible and easiest to use of these is stoneware. The clay itself is even cheaper than most polymer clays by weight! BUT... you need access to a kiln. Being an hour out from Chicago, there's no shortage of kilns in the area, but most studios in the suburbs are oriented toward pottery painting or classes, while studios in the city tend to have membership-based pricing for studio use. Either way, it's about $100 just to try things out. It's been a while since I've worked with ceramics (mostly in school or community art classes), but I recall the basics, which were mostly about how to keep your work from exploding in the kiln. So I understand why a lot of studios don't want to cater to random folks working without an instructor nearby.

It does complicate things, though.

Now, another "option" is to buy a kiln. Small kilns that are more than large enough for my purposes can go for as low as $300 or so, about the same as a 2-month membership with a pottery studio, but are more frequently around $2000 or more. And they need ventilation. And possibly some amount of rewiring. This is on top of the cost of electricity. If you're already fully committed to working with ceramics frequently, it's not a bad idea, but it's otherwise just not practical.

Then there's air dry clay. There's a lot of mixed information on how food safe air dry clay is, probably because there are so many different air dry clays. After all, the only thing a clay needs to be defined as "air dry" is that it dries in air. But in general, air dry clay are not food-safe on their own, but because they tend to be porous like polymer clay, and many do not handle water very well, neither of which should be much of a problem for silicone mold-making once they're sealed. The risk of anything harmful leaching into the mold seems to depend on the exact air dry clay used.

Some people swear by DAS and Amaco air dry clay, but I figured I might be able to bypass trying to determine the safety of their compositions with a homemade clay. I came across a recipe for baking soda clay (it's even on the Arm & Hammer website) that seems reasonably safe and simple:

2 cups baking soda

1 cup corn starch

1 1/4 cups water

Mix it all in a pan, cook it over medium heat, stir until it looks like mashed potatoes, and knead it once it's cool. Easy. Randos on YouTube say it's great.

I thought a Magellanic penguin would be a good test because they retain a lot of detail even when simplified. The critter is less-detailed and less-precise, made just by pinching a ball of clay rather than cutting and carving.

Also, I just like Magellanic penguins

The baking soda clay was soft and very fine in texture, but stubborn and without much stretch. Attaching pieces to each other proved difficult, and it was hard to get hard edges or smooth out cut or carved areas. The only tools I had on hand were a serrated steak knife and a bamboo skewer, so things might've gone better if I'd used a craft knife or dedicated clay tools, but my Super Sculpey figures were made with less. I draped a moist paper towel over the pieces so they'd dry more slowly, but the paper towel dried out overnight while the clay took over 24 hours longer. The results had a chalky texture, and turning them over revealed some cracks (heh) in this plan.

This clay is not all it's cracked up to be

In truth, I made the critter because I got frustrated with the penguin and wanted to make SOMETHING that I thought would come out right. Unfortunately, the thickness ended up making the cracks more severe. These may be salvageable with a little clay to fill the cracks, some sanding, and a coat of shellac, but this is looking like less of a serious sculpting clay and more of a clay to keep the kids busy for a while. It's not something I want to keep fighting against, especially when the results are this bad.

I still have a big lump of clay leftover, so I'll have to figure out what to do with that.

In the realm of homemade clays, salt dough was suggested too. It's less prone to cracking than the baking soda clay, but my past experiences with it all involved much wrangling to get any detail into it. Salt dough has plenty of good applications and is good for keeping kids busy if you also want to keep what they made, but it's not for intricate designs.

One clay that advertises itself as "food grade" and for detail work is Monster Clay. It's an oil-based clay that doesn't cure, just hardens, and is commonly used in the world of special effects prosthetics. While I haven't seen it used much for food, the fact that it's intended for making things that stay on actors' faces for hours at a time is promising. Additionally, the recommended way to use it is to heat it until it melts at 150-170 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 339-350 Kelvin), then letting it cool to a more solid state. This ensures the clay's workability, but 165°F (347K) is where most bacteria will die, so there's a level of sterilization built into its use.

When stoneware isn't an option, Monster Clay seems like the next best choice.

It is, however, a bit expensive, not widely available, and requires a bit of preparation, so I'll leave that for the next installment.

For now, here are some chocolate cookies I made with my Brown Bag molds and decorated with some luster dust and petal dust:

Even with all the painting, it really is so much less of a hassle than icing cutout cookies. I haven't figure out how to make them taste good yet, but it's a process.

Finally, a song. I stumbled across Na zare by Alyans from 1987 not too long ago, really enjoyed it, and was happy to see that Alyans (albeit with some member changes) still makes music. This one starts with the word "облако" meaning "cloud" so I used just that part in an Instagram story showing off one of the above lighthouse cookies with the painted clouds. I'm sure everyone got the joke and had a good chuckle.

Cookie Quest, part 1: There has to be a better way

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?

I haven't forgiven Matsuko for her comments about Atarashiichizu, but I enjoy her shows nonetheless

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.

The bird and the cut-apart florals have consistently come out the best out of the designs I have

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.