Honeybee Cookies place candy bees sitting comfortably atop a honey almond iced shortbread cookie thee whole family will love.

Honeybee Cookies

Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

For this month’s #FilltheCookieJar I wanted to do something very Springlike, along with getting a chance to use one of my flower cookie cutters, so after seeing someone somewhere craft a bee out of a jelly bean, thought it would be perfect with Easter coming up.

Shopping for ingredients I thought maybe jelly beans would be a bit small. I did come across a bag of jumbo black jelly beans. I thought at that point I might do that and flavor the cookies the way I would anisette cookies, at least until I saw the container of dark chocolate covered almonds. With that I wanted to do almond extract with a hint of honey. It seemed especially appropriate since the wings were going to be almonds as well.

At that point I needed something for eyes. I was going to try to find something like silver dragees, but when I saw the little multi-colored round candies, thought they would be very whimsical, especially the red ones.

Putting the eyes and wings on is slightly slow.  I figured out quickly that applying a dot of icing and pressing the bee body onto the candies was more effective than trying to pick up the eyes. The wings were fairly easy, although my packet had quite a few broken ones. Must be my week for it- I’d bought a box of taco shell boats for another recipe I was working on this week, with dinner all but ready to find all but one had crumbled.

The icing on these does require the drying time so things stay put. The Wilton icings are not as good for the wings and eyes since it is thin abd the wings and eyes try the slide before drying. But I had a tube of the black icing and that worked great as a cement of sorts. The color is not a problem at all since it blends in with the bee body.

Of course should you not have the time to mess with the bees, the shortbread itself is a cinch. You can do cutouts, roll it out and cut into squares or press into a prepared shortbread pan. Those would be baked at the same temp until they are just lightly browning at the edges, in case yours are a different thickness in the pan.

If you can’t find suitable almonds, I’d thought something like shaped tootsie roll bits, fudge or fondant would do nicely as well. Especially if you have to improvise on ingredients.

But the idea is to have fun with these as a family project with kids (mine sort of look like a kid did them—rofl!) I just wouldn’ plan on very small children helping with it unless they wanted to do the cookie cutters, or maybe if you use tootsie rolls they can handle that. But bigger kids should quite enjoy this project.

I hope everyone has as much fun as I did! No kids around to help with it, except the adult ones behind this blog. Until next time-

~Sue

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