Totoro Cookies: Best Neighbors Ever

Having totoros as your neighbors really would be amazing. A napping spot, friends to help your wilting plants grow (I would really need help here), and a cat bus to borrow when you're in a jam. Like, do any of you have neighbors who would be so generous?

Just so we're clear on my Japanese animation creds here, I've never watched any of the Miyazaki films in Japanese, or even in Japanese with English subtitles. Nope, I'm super American and have only watched these with their English dubs. I don't exactly have anything to compare to, but every English dubbed one I've seen has been great. Except maybe Ponyo. But that was mainly the general obnoxiousness of the voices of small children with minimal adorable/fanciful creatures in between. Though, the movie did result in this amazing gifset:

Anyways, I'm a sucker for movies with strong family/sibling relationships. Especially when the movies are geared towards children because I'm secretly also still 5, though probably a little busier. But only a little, because its kind of lame to try to one-up a 5 year old with the "Oh I'm so0o0o0o0 busy thing." But if Frozen was the smash-hit disney movie of the decade because of its strong female sibling relationship, My Neighbor Totoro is like the oscar, life-time achievement for sisterly relationships. Maybe it's because I'm an older sister and relate the forced responsibilities and frustrations and love, but its probably more the simplicity of the story that makes the sisters in Totoro shine. There's all these little snippet scenes of just absolutely ordinary interactions- making weird bellowing noises, greedily running out in front of one another, laughing at stupid things that really aren't that funny or make sense, small fussy arguments, things that do nothing to pull a plot forward persay, but do everything to pull you into this little world of adorable troll neighbors.

People who hate animated films, or rather, find them boring, always tell me that they just can't get into the stories because everything is so unreal- like animated singing, dancing, animals or ~magic~ just throws them off. But to me, its the opposite. Movies with real people and real settings feel unrealistic because the way the characters and stories move in all that reality is so fake and cheesy compared to what happens in real world. Like, if The Notebook were set in an animated world, with maybe some magic, or spirity Home Depots helping Ryan Gosling build that house, I probably would have enjoyed the movie at least 100% more. Animated films, aside from just being beautifully drawn/designed, establish from the very beginning that yo, this is not the real world, so don't think about all the geo-socio-economic-political problems that make everything so unrealistic. Just suspend reality, and take in this new world where wizards have star-fire powered moving houses, and things like true love can happen between a girl and a river spirit. Ok, these things definitely sound a little insane without context, but if anyone reading this ever wants to movie marathon introduction to Miyazaki films, I will be there, artisan popcorn in hand, and maybe these cookies if you give me a 2 day heads up.

These cookies were made for a friend's birthday. I was originally planning on just getting the Totoro cutters because they were cute on Etsy, but being vain and greedy, I decided I wanted to use them first to make cookies to send along with the cookie cutters. These were some seriously complicated cutters. The level of details that were in these cutters was probably the only reason why these cookies look even reasonably consistent from one to the next. I used a black food pen for the small totoros (white ones), as evidences by some really interesting eyeball design choices....

My kitchen continues to have an abundance of lavender and rosewater (surprise there), so I added some lavender to my normal sugar cookie recipe, and rosewater to the royal icing. I think I may have added too much rose water or corn syrup to the royal icing because the icing was incredibly sticky. I added some more powdered sugar, and gave the cookies an extra day to dry, which ultimately fixed the problem, but I'll have to pay better attention to my ratios in the future and not get lazy about measurements.

Totoro cookie cutters from CookieCutters4U on Etsy (they started my dream side career of 3D printing cookie cutters of the strangest, non-commerciable type). The dough needs to be legit 1/4'' thick, or thicker for the center details to become pressed onto the cookies.

Same basic sugar cookie recipe from The Kitchn, but modified with 2 tsp of lavender blended with the sugar, and about 1/2 tsp of rose water.

Royal Icing from Bake at 350, with the addition of 1/2 tsp of rose water. I only needed 1/2 the batch of frosting for the number of cookies seen the the first image, with lots leftover.