Gobble, Gobble

Have I mentioned how much I adore Pinterest?  It’s really become an obsession of mine.  I mostly use it to find recipes and get ideas for clothes (and shoes!).  I was kind of worried when I started pinning things that I would just pin stuff and then never do anything with all those pins.  Fortunately I had nothing to worry about.  I’ve actually made more than 2/3 of the stuff that I have pinned.

A while ago I pinned a turkey cookie that I wanted to make for Jack’s Thanksgiving party at school.  I had a plan.  I thought that this weekend I would get everything, practice making a few and then make the rest of them Monday night.  I, of course, was assuming that the Thanksgiving party would be Tuesday or Wednesday next week.  It was a GREAT plan. A plan that was shattered Monday night when we walked into Jack’s classroom for parent-teacher conferences and saw that the party would be Wednesday (today).  A whole week earlier than I had thought.

So last night after work, I ran to the grocery store and grabbed all the necessary ingredients.  After the boys went to bed, I dove in.  I was kind of nervous about how they would turn out, but they don’t look too bad, if I do say so myself.

If you follow the Pinterest link, the original post has detailed instruction on how to make the turkeys.  After making 25 of them last night, I thought I would add a few tips.

First, I decided to skip the base and feet.  My audience is three year olds, so they won’t really care if the turkeys are standing or not.  Plus my poor husband has to transport the cookies, two kids and all their other daily stuff.  I figured standing cookies would just be one more hassle for him to deal with.

Now, I don’t know if my house was just extra hot yesterday (woohoo for a 60 degree day in November!), but I found that the icing was kind of runny at first and the peanut butter cups melted a little as I held them.  So to fix that, I stuck the icing and peanut butter cups in the fridge for a little bit.  The icing was a little thicker and went on better and no melting chocolate on my hands.

I worked on six cookies at a time.  I set up a little assembly line and did one step at a time.  It allowed the icing to set just a little bit before I moved onto the next step.  This was particularly important for the candy corn/feather step.  Those candy corn just don’t want to stay on very well and the set icing helped a little bit.

After I finished each set of cookies, I set them on a platter and stuck them in the fridge while I worked on the next set.  Again, this just helped the icing set a little bit more quickly.  Just 5 or 10 minutes in the fridge made a huge difference.

This is a super simple, really cute project for Thanksgiving dinner or a kid’s party.  And of course when I showed Jack this morning.  He was thoroughly unimpressed.  Typical.

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