How to Make Pixel Cookies - Detailed

For a friend’s birthday, I decided I would take on the challenge of making pixel cookies. Figuring that I’ve experienced the tediousness of the perler beads crafts, I thought I was prepared for this endeavor, but I was kind of wrong. Please read the whole post as it explains my mistakes in great detail.

Let me preface this event with the fact that I’ve never made cookies by myself. In fact the last time I remember making cookies with someone was waaaay back in elementary school. But since I stumbled upon these instructions, a lot of it seemed intuitive to me. Let me walk you through the process.

The Ingredients

From that website:

2.5 cups flour
3/4 cups sugar, blitzed in a food processor until fine (I didn’t do this)
1/4 tsp salt
two sticks of butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces, at room temperature (more on this later)
2tsp vanilla extract
2tbs cream cheese, softened

Following the website’s instructions, I proceeded to blitz everything (with a hand-held mixer), and to my horror, huge puffs of flour went everywhere. After some trial and error, I had to remove the pieces of flour-coated butter, place in a bowl, and microwave for only 30 seconds. After that, the flour behaved itself because the melted butter stuck everything together, so I was able to mix everything. My mixing bowl is also very shallow.

After a while, the dough starts looking dry and crumbly. Drawing upon my perler bead crafting experience, I remembered how quickly I ran out of white and black perler beads. I figured these cookies would probably result in the same way, so I split half the dough to be “white”, and left half the dough to make “black”.

Dye the Dough
I bought cocoa powder in anticipation of this, and kept sprinkling spoonfuls into the dough with my left hand and kneading the dough with my right hand.

This is what it looks like when you mix in cocoa (or other powder, as I will explain later). The photo was taken in the middle of its transformation, and it is far from done. You know you’re finished when the dough starts looking like…I’m sorry…a turd.

Here’s also where I started taking the recipe down a deviant path. See, I figured it would be really cool to not only dye the dough a certain color, but to have a certain flavor associated with each color.

So I bought Jello. I figured I’d use the powders to dye and flavor each section of the dough. I bought raspberry, orange, lime, blue raspberry, grape, and midnight cherry. Since I’d already used up my batch of dough for “black” and “white”, I set out to make another batch.

I then divided up that batch into 4 smaller batches, and used raspberry, orange, lime, and blue raspberry. After mixing in the colors, they look like this:

I also tasted each batch of dough and felt that the flavors were nice and surprising….however, I had no idea how it would change after the cookies were baked.

I wrapped each dough in its own seran wrap and placed it in the fridge. Actually I refridgerated it over night because at that point I was tired and it was time to sleep. The next morning I woke up and the dough was as hard as a rock! I panicked, but took all the dough and placed it outside of the fridge. Sure enough, by the time I came back after work, all the dough was soft again. Phew!

Set Up the Factory

I bought the Playdoh Factory from Target for only $5, like the website said. I used the pattern with four squares and planned to do the exact same Tetris pattern as they did as well as some Mario cookies.

Do your research at:

• Video Game Sprites
• Game Sprite Archives
• VG Museum

Choose something simple! I thought Mario was simple but he turned out to be very difficult. I drew the sprite image on lined paper and counted the number of colors I would have to lay per section of each row. This is a lot harder than perler beads.

I arranged the cellophane to help keep the workplace clean. Also, when the cookie is finished, you can simply wrap it up move it to the fridge.

Start Building

This is where the tediousness begins. It’s hard to keep track of what row/column you are when the dough is soft and malleable. So it turns out, because I added powder to the dough, it became more dry and brittle. Every time I squeezed the dough out of the playdoh extruder, it would break every couple of inches or so. That was frustrating. Maybe using Jello was a bad idea…

Keep your workspace clean as you don’t want random colored pieces of dough sticking to your work-in-progress. You can see my drawing on the paper for referencing Mario. Too bad I never got to the ?-box - I ran out of dough. Notice how short the Mario cookie is. I worked on the Mario cookie after finishing the Tetris cookie, so I used up most of the dough already.

Also, each time I switched the colored dough in the playdoh extruder, I cleaned out the old dough. Otherwise, I would start mixing colors and they would get dirty looking. I didn’t have the guts to try to see if it actually mattered….it might not.

When the cookie was done, I wrapped it up in the cellophane beneath it and placed it in the fridge over night. The next morning, I cut the cookie with a butcher knife. That was pretty difficult. The Tetris cookies have a small rectangular shape and was naturally easier to cut. The Mario cookie was a lot bigger, so it was more difficult to slice.

In the end, it was ready to go.

Prepare for Baking

I preheated the oven to 375 degrees F and placed the cookies on parchment paper that I got at Albertson’s. You don’t need to prep the parchment paper with an oil spray or anything - the cookies don’t stick. Heck, they better not, they have tons of butter in them!

I put the cookies in for about 10 minutes. I would open the oven every 5 minutes to make sure they weren’t charred messes. I always have this phobia of burning food apparently.

Oh yeah, so about the cocoa dough - I barely used it! I was so disappointed, I can’t believe I “wasted” dough like that. After the tediousness of making pixel cookies, I was exhausted and didn’t want to expend any more energy with these cookies, so this is what happened to my leftovers:

Doesn’t that look disgusting? It looks even more like a…I’m sorry…turd. Someone liked my chocolate-cherry ones. Yes, at one point I added some midnight cherry Jello to the chocolate dough.

This is all the cookies I could make from the Mario batch. The smaller slices that are slightly browned and charred (because it was the end of the cookie block and it was difficult to cut)? It was really good because of the different flavor!

But in the end, fresh out of the oven…oh my god, they are SO SOFT. I groaned when I bit into a freshly baked cookie. My friend also groaned when she bit into a cookie, it was surprisingly soft. And good.

Except for the Jello part. They were annoyingly sour when these are supposed to be SUGAR COOKIES. Doh!

Lessons Learned

• You don’t need black/white dough as readily as with perler beads, though it depends on the sprite you’re making.
• Find small, condensed sprites for patterns. Mario might be a bit too big - that uses up a lot of dough surprisingly, and the cookie block was difficult to cut because it’s so wide all around.
• Don’t use Jello to flavor the dough! Unless you’re curious! Use food coloring instead. It will have the tendency to make dough damp, but if you stick it in the fridge, it should help a bit.

Stay tuned to see what happens with the leftover Jello!