Super Mario Brothers!

I was a big fan of Super Mario Brothers growing up.  I still remember when I got my old NES system for Christmas.  I don't think I was quite as excited as this kid, but I was pretty freakin' excited.  By far, the coolest game was Mario Brothers.  At least numbers 1 and 3, what the heck happened to #2?  That one was weird...
Anyway, I digress.

The point is, I love old Nintendo games.  They totally bring me back to my youth.  So, that being said, I wanted to keep these cookies in the old school 8-bit style.

Ironically, these were ordered by one of my very best friends from grade school.  I'm pretty sure whenever we were too lazy to walk to the local market for candy and pickles (weird I know, but true), or didn't feel like setting up the board for Mall Madness, we were playing NES (OK, or watching MTV, but don't tell my Mom that).

To make these cookies, I knew I was going to need my KopyKake projector, so I set about looking for the perfect images to use.  Luckily, my husband is very knowledgeable about video games (wow, I never thought I would use the word "luckily" in that sentence), so he helped me find a Super Mario Bros 3 sprite sheet online that literally has an image of every character in every possible pose.  The hardest part was choosing which images to use!

After I finally choose 12 images, I blew up them up in Photoshop to give them the signature grainy 8-bit quality.  Then I used my KopyKake projector to trace the outlines onto the cookies using black royal icing and a PME #1.5 tip.  I chose a blue background to mimic the background color of the game.

So, here are all of the final cookies:
You have the good guys:

The frog suit always made me laugh, and still does.  He just looks so silly.  I had to do it.

You fellow Mario Bros fans out there might notice that Yoshi wasn't a part of Super Mario Brothers 3.  He was specifically requested to be included in the order, so he was copied from a Super Nintendo image.  Seriously, who doesn't love Yoshi?

Then there's the bad guys:

Who were you most afraid of?  My nemesis was the flying goomba.

And everyone's best friends:

I had lots of fun making these cookies.  Hopefully the recipients enjoyed them as much as I did :)

PS. Please ignore the fact that some of the icing in the center cookie was still wet when I took this picture!