Dough, Paper, Scissors!

My husband asked me to do some cookies for a co-worker who will be out for a while due to knee surgery.  I searched online for various get well ideas, but most of them were the same as the nursing school set I'd done for my cousin.  Then, I came upon this from an etsy seller.  Pure genius!  I cannot even say that I was inspired by these because I did totally copy them, but feel okay about it because I am only a hobbyist at this and am doing them as a gift, so no pecuniary gain is forthcoming on my part. My husband LOVED the idea.  So, I've set to work on a get well set of 2 dozen cookies for his co-worker, but haven't yet completed the full set, which will consist of these, Rx bottles, capsules and Get Well Soon ones of some sort.  However, I was so excited by these that I couldn't wait to post about them.

"But what does this post title have to do with it?", you ask (not really, I am sure, so I am just putting thoughts in your head).  When I saw these, I knew there was no cutter like that and that I would have to hand cut them.  Problem is, I stink at hand cutting dough with a knife.  The cuts are never clean, and with the intricacies of this design, I knew that it would flop.  So my wheels started turning.  Here's what  I did:

I started by creating a template (yes, I totally printed her cookies and resized them appropriately) and then tracing it directly onto my rolled out dough.  Several times, as you can see.

I then did a rough cut out of each one and froze them.  Once they were frozen and hard, I then took my handy clean kitchen scissors and went to work like a kindergartener cutting them out.  Worked like a charm!  I did find it easier to cut off the excess as I worked, instead of trying to keep one big piece of excess hanging from it as I cut.  Here's a comparison of the one I cut with a knife to the one I cut with the scissors:

See how much cleaner the scissor cut one is?  My husband couldn't really see the difference, but I totally can and you should just pretend you can too in the event you cannot. :)

Now, here's something I would note about this process that I might do differently in the future. If I had a lighter colored food color marker,  I would likely use that instead, because that black one really mucked up the remaining dough after the cuts such that I couldn't really use it because it had strong black spots all in it and thus made cookies that looked dirty.  And who wants to eat a dirty cookie?  The black would likely be fine using the chocolate cookie recipe,  although I have not yet tested how well that recipe would work with scissor cutting, as I have found it tends to be a bit delicate.

Overall I am thrilled with my idea of using scissors and can see so many possibilities for this trick in the future!  The only thing that could have made it better would have been if I'd been making reptilian Star Trek cookies and could have then named the title of this post, "Dough, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock."