Mardi Gras Mask Cookies

Mardi Gras is fast approaching here in Mobile. Only a few weeks left until the first parade hits the town and the crowd goes wild for beads and moon pies being thrown from the elaborately decorated floats. It is truly a month long celebration of weekend parades, fancy costumes and Mardi Gras balls.

To kick off the Mardi Gras season I helped a friend host a mask making party for her Mardi Gras organization, the Butterfly Maidens. Each year all the different groups have a theme and they decorate their floats and make costumes to match.

Here are a few sample masks I made to go with this years theme of black & gold. The black masks were found at our local Mardi Gras shop, Toomeys. Talk about a million types of beads, I have never seen so many different colors, sizes and bead themes in my life.

The gold trim, sequins, jewels, feathers and butterflies were found from the local craft stores.

It was only right for me to make some mask cookies to take to the mask decorating party, right? Since I didn't have a mask cookie cutter I made my own. I found a mask clip art image online and scaled it up to the size I wanted. I printed the shape and cut it out to use as my template. After rolling out my cookie dough I placed the template on top of the dough and using a sharp knife I traced around the shape to create the mask. Yes, this method is a little more time consuming than using a cookie cutter, but it was totally worth it.

I love how the cookies turned out! It was fun to decorate them all differently using purple, green and yellow royal icing and sprinkles.




Everyone at the party loved the cookies! Once the first parade rolls around in February I'm definitely going to have to make another batch, or two or ten!

To learn more about Mobile Mardi Gras click here.

I used this sugar cookie recipe.