Born to Bake

From the time I was 12 years old I have loved Bruce Springsteen.  I remember an assignment in the 8th grade we had to give a presentation to our class on a song that we loved - Oasis was really popular that year, and a lot of people talked about their song 'Wonderwall.'   I got up and talked about 'Streets of Philadelphia.' When I got a record player in my early 20s, one of my first purchases was the vinyl version of the Springsteen Live 1975-1985 boxed set.  One of favourite memories is seeing Springsteen live in Chicago, and being close enough to the front of the pit that when he held his guitar in the audience during Born to Run we got to touch his guitar.  Between studio albums and bootlegs, I have over 1,700 Springsteen songs in iTunes.

And yet, compared to a lot of his fans, I am fairly tame.  His fan-base definitely puts the fanatic in fan.  However, I've poked around the internet, and I haven't really seen too many Springsteen baking projects, and I've been thinking that I would like to combine these two passions into one amazing project.  When my aunt bought  a Kopykake projector this fall, my vision started to take shape, and today we set about turning an icon into a.....cookie icon.

I started by scouring the internet for images of Bruce that would be simple enough to be a manageable project and easily recreated as a silhouette, while still easily, quickly recognizable as The Boss.  I settled on two - one from the Born to Run photos (and used on the cover of his Greatest hits); the other from the Born in the USA era - both easily recognizable as Bruce, at least to casual fans.

For the Kopykake projector process to work, I knew I needed versions of these images with less detail that would be easier to outline onto cookies.   For the first one, I found a "Born to Crawl" onesie for sale on Etsy that had done a great job of simplifying the image, while "The Bruce Springsteen Songbook" took care of the second one.

Ready to get going, I baked a batch of sugar cookies using blogger Sugar Belle's recipe, because it doesn't need to chill at all, which worked nicely with my impatience.  They were a perfect blank canvas:

Today I brought these cookies over to my aunt's house to use the projector for the cookie magic.  We discussed using an edible ink marker to trace the images onto the cookies, but decided to flood the cookies with white royal icing first, to give us a nice, smooth surface to work with.

We put a fan on them to dry the white icing, while we prepared the black icing...and the Kopykake.  With the images printed and set up inside the projector, it fit perfectly on the cookie, allowing us to outline The Boss with a superfine tip, and then flood with the runnier icing.

The end result?  Even better than I was hoping for.  Seriously.  If Springsteen's lyrics are, as British journalist Sarafraz Manzoor says, a "direct  road to all that is useful, wise and meaningful in life," then these cookies make some good snacks for the road.