Once again I had the pleasure of making birthday treats for a very special friend whom I love so much. Her name is Dessie and she has a couple of beautiful kids, Leo and Gabbie.
Today’s treats were designed for Leo’s 4th birthday. Leo loves animals and he decided to celebrate his birthday at the Des Moines Zoo. Suggested by his mom, a jungle/zoo animal theme was the perfect design.
First things first, finding cute and age appropriate jungle animal clipart. Here’s my inspiration and design base. Just google “jungle animal clipart” if you are ever looking for ideas.
Bakers Tip: Working with large and simple clipart to create cookie or cake decorations is easier than small and busy pictures. The details will drive you crazy when the pictures are small and very detailed.
Here are Leo’s Jungle Animal cupcakes! Cupcake flavors included Chocolate butter and Lemon with a Raspberry filling all of them topped with Buttercream icing.
Dessie’s husband, our dear friend Jon, loves my cookies so sugar cookies were part of my plan.
Now that I’m editing this post, I’m wondering why I didn’t make giraffe print cookies. Oh well….
I arranged a pretty birthday platter for Leo to make Leo’s birthday extra special. Sorry for the ugly pictures.
And the rest of the cookies were bagged in clear treat bags for gift giving. I think by far my favorite animal cookie this time was the tiger below.
The birthday party at the zoo was a lot of fun. They brought out three animals out so children would learn about them. The visitors were a domesticated bunny (aahhhh), a small alligator (scaaary), and the third one I can’t remember, but my boy tells me that it was a turtle so we’ll go with that. The kids and some of the grown ups got to touch them… NOT me. That alligator jumped out of the box when they were taking him out. Thankfully they caught him!!
Happy Birthday sweet Leo. We loved making the treats for you and I hope you also loved them too. Love Ya!