Chocolate sugar cookies with bright royal icing.
The dough and royal icing recipes comes from the wondrous Joy of Baking site. We’re using chocolate cookies as to get a dark backdrop for the Space Invaders dudes. This game is over 30 years old!
Ingredients:
2 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (two sticks) unsalted butter
1 3/4 cups granulated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Ingredients for Royal Icing:
4 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons meringue powder
1/2 cup warm water
Red, orange, green, etc. food colorings of your choice
Allow the butter to come to room temperature or soften it up in the microwave. You’ll want it soft, but not melted. Blend in the sugar.

Beat in the eggs and mix in the vanilla extract.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder.


Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. This is going to make for a pretty thick dough. I added the dry mixture to my mixer and stirred slowly (the cocoa powder makes quite a cloud when stirred), then finished the mixing by hand because it was so thick.

If your dough is a little soft, pop in the fridge for about 30 minutes for it to harden. This will make it easier to work with when cutting out the shapes.
Once you’re ready to cut out the circles, sprinkle out a little flour and roll out your dough so it’s about 1/4 inch thick.

Using a circular cookie cutter, cut out the shapes and place on a cookie sheet. I used a larger cookie cutter so I could create larger space invaders on the cookies.
Pop into a a preheated 350F oven for 10-15 minutes.
Cool the cookies to cool.

For the royal icing, whisk together the powdered sugar and meringue powder.

Add warm water to the royal icing until it’s smooth and glossy. You’ll want it pretty thick so the Space Invader designs will hold their shape.

Spoon a few tablespoons – the amount depends on how many cookies of this color you’ll want to frost – of the royal icing into a bowl. Add a drop of your color of choice and mix.

Scoop the colored royal icing into a plastic bag and seal. Snip the tip of the bag off.
Draw the Space Invader of your choice onto the cookie using the bag of royal icing and allow it to set. Because the icing is so thick, it’ll be a few hours before it completely hardens.


Repeat with other colors and Invaders as your heart fancies.
Using 3″ cookies, you’ll get a little over two dozen chocolate cookies.

this are awesome!!!
i love all the cookies you make
I think I need to ask my wife nicely to bake some of these!
you’ve got such awesome ideas! i’m a baker not a gamer but i love these. i think i might add some espresso to the cookie mix.
Let me first say that I love your site! I just made these cookies for a bake sale for work – they are fun to make and SO good! I had to test one or three, just to ensure consistent quality 😉
this is a wonderful website, im a gamer and a baker and these are perfect for me and my boyfriend (more gamer than baker) thank you for making this amazing site! xx
Hey jocelyn,
This is amazing. I am a big fan of retro games and space invaders — I’m sure these are delicious. I think I’ll have to make one.
I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that you might like. It’s space invader chocolate bar — http://www.chocolateinvader.com — what do you think?
– Mark
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