How to Make School Bus Cookies

Written by Mike Tamplin • Jul 14, 2018

Continuing on with the tutorials for the latest back-to-school designs this year, these school bus cookies are probably my favorite out of the whole bunch.

For inspiration, I modeled these school bus cookies after the characters in the Disney movie, Cars. With their windshield wiper eyebrows and their front grill smiles, my goal was to give these buses a ton of personality. This design does take a few more steps to complete, but I hope to lay out each step of the process in the tutorial below.

School Bus Cookie Cutter

You can find this school bus cookie cutter in my shop.

Template for the School Supply Cookies

To help with the decorating process, I made a PDF template available for all the back-to-school supply designs shown.

You can download the 2018 back-to-school supply cookie templates HERE.

If you have a Kopykake or Pico projector, just print it out (or pull it up on your mobile device) and you are good to go. For those without a projector, follow the suggested steps below by tracing the design onto the cookie with an edible food marker.

The Decorating Process

For the colors used for these school bus cookies, you will need the following suggested colors:

Yellow royal icing. (I mixed Americolor Egg Yellow with a touch of Americolor Orange.)
Light Blue icing (I used just a touch of Americolor Sky Blue.)
Red icing (I used Americolor Tulip Red.)
Black icing (I used Americolor Super Black.)
Gray icing (I used just a tiny touch of Americolor Super Black.)

Step 1

For those without a projector, mark guidelines where the windshield, bumper, and grill smile should be, as shown. I made a template with template plastic from the PDF file above and used a food marker to draw the guidelines on the cookie.

Step 2

Begin by filling in alternating sections. I started by outlining and filling the windshield and all the gray sections.

Let the icing set for 20 minutes, then move on to filling in the black sections. Let the icing dry for about an hour.

Step 3

Once the icing sections had time to dry, outline and fill the remaining cookie surface with yellow icing. Let this icing set for another hour.

After the base layer of icing has crusted over, add the headlights and the top stop lights. For the headlights, I started with an outline ring of gray and then quickly filled the middles with white icing.

Step 4

Next, with yellow icing and a #1.5 tip, outline the body details.

Finally, add the black details like the eyes, the eyebrow wipers, the grill smile border, and the tread on the tires.

For the grill "teeth" lines, I drew in the lines using a fine tipped food marker.

Video Tutorial

The steps above are demonstrated in the time-lapsed video below.

These school bus cookies are great as a single cookie favor, or as a set of two. In the 2-cookie set, I paired it with a simple chalkboard using this rounded rectangle cookie cutter.