Lacing cookies

It appears that the last week or so it was "time to get ill" although not "ill" in the Beastie Boys sense of the word, more "ill" in the revoltingly infectious, night of the living dead, dawn of the dead, day of the dead , mid afternoon and tea time of the living dead kind of way. Bleugh! We're rounding the corner of this episode of the lurgi it seems, so we celebrated with a shed load of cookies.

We didn't have any fall themed cookie cutters, so I thought I'd try using a pair of pliers to bend a round cookie cutter into a turkey shape. It worked pretty darn well. I might have to stock up on a few round cookie cutters that we can customize to our own shapes in the future.

The kids cut out a load of turkeys and circles and even around their own hands with a butter knife to make our sugar cookie shapes. We don't have a surface in our kitchen that isn't tiled, so I have a large piece of plywood that I taped a clear plastic sheet to. We plonk that on our kitchen table to roll out icing, dough, pastry etc. It wipes clean nice and easily and is a piece of cake to stash away because it's light and very thin.





I got out a bunch of plastic letter and number playdough cutters that we found at a garage sale for them to try, but my three year old just wanted to arrange them in order rather than cut dough with them, which was fine and dandy. We did manage to stamp out their initials in each hand print cookie though.



I used a straw to cut out holes in the cookies like we did with our salt dough ornaments last year. I thought that it would make it interesting to try and make cookies that could be used as threading/lacing cards.



I found that once I had baked the cookies, the holes although still there had closed up a lot, so while they were fresh out of the oven and still soft, I just punched the holes again with another straw.





We had a packet of caramel flavoured laces from Ikea that were pretty long and looked like they would do the trick. Red laces would be yum too, although I've not seen those in the US.



The kids enjoyed threading the edible laces, and the cookies were strong enough that they held up to the lacing antics just fine. Then they squeezed some icing on them. It's not every day that mum lets you eat a cookie the size of your head!





The cookie cutter shape I made was supposed to be a turkey, but it sort of looked like a basket too.



Anyhoooo, the ages my kids are, we weren't going to be able to make such a detailed decoration, so they just painted the icing on them willy nilly with paint brushes to make rainbow cookies, so the turkey thing went out the window. It was still good to know that it's easy to make custom cookie cutters that way though. It would be lovely to make a fall leaf shape cutter and then paint on the yellow and red icing. Bet that would be really pretty!









Mmmm cooooookies. Sometimes food? Pah! Your're not fooling anyone Cookie Monster!