Lavender Lemon Hippocampus Cookies: aka Seahorses

For those of us who are less nerdy and who spend less time looking at brains, or who maybe don't bother memorizing the names of aquatic animals in Latin, hippocampus is 1) the latin term for seahorse, and 2) the name we give the structure of the brain that is deeply involved in learning, memory, and navigation. Given that these functions are involved in almost anything and everything we do, the hippocampus is also pretty frequently affected by diseases (ie Alzheimer's, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc).

It's also one of the most distinctively structured part of the brain, with a mass of well organized cells and layers as you can see below in probably one of the widely distributed pictures of a hippocampus ever where each adjacent neuron (the dots) is labeled a distinct color.

via J Litchman Lab 

The combined quirk of its name, its hugely important role in major functions, and its pretty structure all make the hippocampus the pet favorite of a lot of neuroscientists/neurologists/neurosurgeons/etc. For example, my former (tears) lab has a picture of a seahorse hanging out in our lab, and one of the neurosurgeons our lab works with has hippocampi/seahorses decorating a large portion of his wardrobe in addition to his entire office (supposedly). And here I am drinking in the hippocampus kool-aid, making seahorse shaped cookies for my lab as an adieu. Well rather, made, since I've officially left as of last week. Big life changes make leaving sad, but on the other hand, there are new exciting Californian things to look forward to as well.

Of course, there are probably a lot of neuroscientists who may think the hippocampus is overrated, because there are a lot of other interesting/weird brain structures also hugely important since in this day and age, we know that no singular area of the brain is solely responsible for a task/behavior, but rather dependent on a network of regions and how they communicate. That aside, other brain structures have weird names too. Take the amygdala, hugely important in emotions, decisions, and memory, named after the drought pariah almond. Then there's the zona incerta, which is literally called "the uncertain zone," because no one really knows what its role is.

Now that I've spent way too long talking about the brain, I'm sure the real questions for a food blog are 1) did they actually taste good? and 2) how did these decorations work? As you may notice, lavender and lemon are a pretty frequent combination I use, in part thanks to my lifetime supply of lavender that I will probably never finish. But also, lavender and lemon is just a great combination for other fairly boring sugar cookies. That said, I think the lavender and lemon flavors were a bit more muted this time, in part because I had a fear of feeding my lab people flowers, and in part due to the neutral/almond flavored icing on top.

With regard to point 2), these were decorated the standard way- creating an initial border with thick icing, then flooding with thinned icing. The designs on the inside were either made with thick icing lines after the inner flood icing dried, or by adding dots of thinned icing to the still wet flood icing and then running a toothpick through the circle to create the hearts/swirled effect. And the black dot? A food pen because I'm the type of person who owns a decorative, edible food pen.

Sugar Cookie Recipe via The Kitchn, modified to add 1-2 tsp of dried lavender buds, blended separately with the sugar in a food processor before adding.

Royal Icing Recipe via Bake at 350. I find that about 1/2 the batch is usually fine for 1 batch of the above sugar cookie recipe. Doubling is way too much.