It’s Final Fantasy week! Found in just about every Final Fantasy game, the Cactuar inspires these running cactus cookies.

When digging up pictures for this little cactus looking guy, I discovered he goes by “Cactuar” far more than “Cactrot” in the Final Fantasy series. He’s called the latter in Final Fantasy VII, but from that point on he’s “Cactuar.” Wikipedia reveals the origin:

The name Cactuar is the western localization of the original Japanese Sabotender, a portmanteau of “Saboten Pretender”, “saboten” meaning “cactus” in Japanese.

Your geek trivia for the day!
Here’s what you’ll need:
Ingredients:

1 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
30 drops green food coloring
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
A handful of chocolate sprinkles
Black gel

Special hardware:

Pastry bag
One of those pointy thingies that go on the end.

Preheat oven to 350F!
Liquidate the butter and mix with the sugar. Mix in the eggs and vanilla. Add roughly 30 drops of green food coloring. Seems like a lot, but you’ll need it.

Add the dry ingredients. Mix! You don’t want the dough to be too thick, which is why we melted the butter in the beginning. The viscosity should be low for the cookie dough to flow out the pastry bag with ease.

Grab the pointy end thingie and twist it onto the pastry bag.

Looks dangerous.

Spoon dough into pastry bag. Squeeze hard and mentally prepare to form Cactrot shapes. Make sure you twist the top of the pastry bag to close it off before squeezing, otherwise dough blasts out the wrong end when pressure is applied. Not all Cactrots will be the same; the dough sticks to the nozzle at times and makes razor-edge precision difficult.
Here’s the path that I used for drawing the cactus doods:

Chef hat!

For the legs and arms, you’ll want to start them on the body to get a good connection. Otherwise, the joint between the arm / leg and the body will be too thin, causing the appendages to fall off during the transfer from cookie sheet to plate.

Bake for about eight minutes.
For the quills, you can either poke three chocolate sprinkles into the cookie top before the cookie cools, or wait until later and apply with a little black gel.

You can see some cookies with green sprinkles. Only a couple cookies have the sprinkles; they didn’t really add to the Cactrot look so I didn’t include them in other cookies.

To finish, use the black gel to make two dots for the eyes and a line for the mouth.
Makes about two dozen Cactrots.

Fat Cactrot!

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