Mr. DNA Jurassic Park Cookies

Jurassic Park is full of great movie quotes, but “BINGO! Dino DNA!” is definitely a classic.

Mr. DNA is such a fun, iconic cartoon from the original Jurassic Park movie, and with my recent movie night sponsored by BoxLunch (click through this Instagram Story Highlight for details!), he came right to mind when I was planning the snack menu. (What’s a movie night without *themed* snacks, right?)

Full disclosure — I am a royal icing decorator BEGINNER! It can be a hard icing to work with, and I’ve complained about it in past posts, but I’m happy that my practice is starting to pay off and love how these cookies turned out.

If you’re a royal icing beginner like I am, don’t let that intimidate you! These cookies, especially Mr. DNA himself, don’t require a lot of extensive icing work. Give them a go for your next Jurassic Park movie night and your friends and family will thank you.

Jurassic Park Cookies — Mr. DNA and Bingo! Dino DNA! Phrases

What You Need:

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For the Cookies

2 sticks of butter (1 cup), room temperature
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 egg
3 cups flour
Printed Mr. DNA and phrases to use as stencils
Plastic wrap

For the Royal Icing and Decorating

3 tablespoons of meringue powder
4 cups of powdered sugar
1/2 c. warm water (total) — 1/4 c. for the icing base and the remainder to reach desired consistency
1 tsp. vanilla
Food safe marker
Food coloring — royal blue, teal, pink, yellow, black
Icing bags
Scissors
Toothpicks

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the butter, sugar, vanilla, and egg together in a large bowl, then slowly add the flour.

Form a ball with the dough and wrap it in plastic wrap to chill in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.

Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it out to 1/4 inch thickness.

Print out Mr. DNA illustration and cut out the character with scissors, leaving extra space along the edge. Then, use a paring knife to cut out cookies in that shape. Similarly for the words, cut each word out separately as a rectangle, leaving extra space around the edge. Then, use a paring knife to cut out cookies in those shapes.

Bake your cookies on a baking sheet for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown around the edges.

Let the cookies sit on the baking sheet for several minutes, then transfer them to a cooling rack.

For the royal icing, beat the meringue powder, powdered sugar, vanilla and 1/4 c. warm water in a bowl.

Split the icing into separate bowls to create various colors of icing (listed below). For each color, you will need both a detail consistency (for outlining) and flood consistency (thinner for filling the spaces). Add each prepared icing to an icing bag and set aside until you need it. When it comes time to use an icing bag, cut a *small* piece off of the tip to ensure that you have only a small, controllable amount of icing coming out at a time.

For icing colors, you’ll need:

A small amount of black icing for Mr. DNA’s mouth, pupils, eyebrows
Royal blue icing for the base of each cookie
Pink icing for the spots in Mr. DNA’s body
Teal icing for the spots in Mr. DNA’s body
Yellow icing for the spots in Mr. DNA’s body, hands, fingers
White (plain) icing for the spots in Mr. DNA’s body, eyes, lettering

Using royal blue icing, use the detail consistency to pipe a border around each cookie, then use your flood consistency to fill each cookie entirely with blue icing. Let the cookies dry COMPLETELY (overnight, if possible) before moving onto the letters and other shapes.

Once the royal blue icing base has dried, use the food safe marker to draw an outline of the letters and Mr. DNA’s features on the cookie. To make this easier for the letters, I cut out the letters and used the remaining piece as a stencil.

After your letters are drawn on the cookies, use white detail icing to outline each letter, forming an edge for you to add white flood icing within.

For Mr. DNA, outline each shape in the corresponding detail icing, then fill it with the matching flood icing color.

Before adding the pupils on top of the white eyes, let the white icing set and dry before moving on to the next color (this will help your icing colors not to bleed).

TIP: When flooding an area with icing, fill in the section with icing and then use a toothpick to quickly smooth the icing into the small corners or to smooth the surface.

And there you have it — BINGO! DINO DNA!