Turkey Gingerbread Cookies

Posted in food & flavor & recipes by Rosemary Lynn

I hope everyone had a yummy Thanksgiving last week!

These Gingerbread Turkeys were one of the treats I made this year.

Just like my Autumn Leaves Mini Gingerbread Cookies, these use the recipe from my Mini Soft Iced Gingerbread Cookies. Because I love these cookies. So, there’s pretty much no way to make too many of these.

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Last year I made turkeys from sugar cookies (Iced Turkey Cutout Sugar Cookies), but I was in the mood for gingerbread.

Again.

I may have made a lot of gingerbread this year. ;)

This time, though, unlike last year, I had a regular turkey-shaped cookie cutter. It made the job a whole lot easier.

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The cookies spread just a tad, but the turkey shape is still recognizable.

Then I made four colors of royal icing: brown, red, yellow, and orange.

I used brown food coloring instead of cocoa powder to make the brown for two reasons: I didn’t want the chocolate flavor and it was much easier to make one batch of icing and add four colors than to make two batches, one chocolate and one regular.

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As you can see from the above photos, I outlines the turkey body first, then colored in the tail and face.

It takes a few minutes to draw the patterns on, but it looks SO cute when it’s done.

And here they are all packaged up to share:

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Here is my post with the gingerbread recipe:

Mini Soft Iced Gingerbread Cookies

And when you go to make the icing, make a double batch, separate it out into four bowls and dye them brown, orange, red, and yellow. You’ll need more brown than any other color.

Then fill a plastic baggy with each color, snip off a small corner, and squeeze the colors onto each cookie like I did in the photos. I did brown (body), then orange (tail feathers), red (tail feathers and wattle), and finally yellow (feathers and beak).

Happy Baking!

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3Dec2014

Iced Turkey Cutout Sugar Cookies {Edible Thanksgiving Place Cards}

Posted in food & flavor & recipes, holidays by Rosemary Lynn

Turkey Iced Cut Out Cookies

Okay, okay: I know it’s December already….. but I hadn’t quite finished posting about Thanksgiving, yet!

Anyway, I just had to share these adorable turkey cut out cookies.

I used the Soft Sugar Cookie Recipe that I used to make the Iced Autumn Leaves, and – since I only needed 6 turkeys – I also made more leaves. The same colors of icing worked for the turkeys, too. :)

And since I was making these only the day before Thanksgiving, my hunt for a turkey-shaped cookie cutter was less than fruitful. The Thanksgiving supplies in the craft stores had already been replaced with Christmas supplies. BUT, it turned out that my aunt had a turkey cookie cutter.

The cookie cutter wasn’t deep enough for the cookie dough, but at this point I didn’t have a lot of other options. And I didn’t feel like cutting out a template or anything crazy like that. So I pressed the cookie cutter into the surface of the dough to make an outline {see the photos below}, and finished cutting out the cookies with a small paring knife.

Luckily I was only planning on making six.

The rest of the dough became leaves. Which I also decorated like I did for the Soft Sugar Cookie recipe I linked to above.

For the turkeys, after cooling the finished cookie completely, I outlined a body shape with brown icing, then filled it in, smoothing slightly with a small angled spatula. Then I outlined tail feathers in red, orange, and yellow, one color at a time, filling them in and allowing them to sit for a minute before adding the next color.

Finally, I added the names of all the kids that were going to be there on Thanksgiving with the yellow icing. And when everything was dry, I stacked the turkeys on top of the colorful leaves on the serving platter. They would be amazing as edible Thanksgiving place cards, but we were eating at my cousin’s house, so everything went on one big plate.

Turkey Iced Cut Out Cookies

If I had time to order the cookie cutter online instead of needlessly store-hopping, I probably would have gotten the R&M Gobbler Turkey Cookie Cutter:

These would have made my life a lot easier by eliminating the step where I had to cut out each cookie individually with a knife.

And the edges would have been a lot cleaner, too.

Oh, well. Next year. And – of course – they still tasted awesome. :)

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9Nov2013

Turkey Treasure Buckets

Posted in activities for kids, holidays by Rosemary Lynn

Turkey Treasure Buckets | Great Thanksgiving Activity for Kids!

This November, in the spirit of Thanksgiving and Autumn, one of the projects we did was to make these Turkey Treasure Buckets.

My girls LOVE being outside.

They’d sleep out there if I let them.

Anyway, I wanted a project that would involve nature. So we made some turkey buckets to collect autumn leaves.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a ton of beautiful, colored leaves where we live in Florida. Our backyard pretty much has a bunch of brown Live Oak leaves. And some sticks, and some mulch, and some grass…

So, nature: yes. Beautiful fall colors: not so much.

I feel bad, too, because we we just in Georgia a couple of weeks ago and we collected a ton of fantastically bright fallen leaves. But I didn’t think to bring any home with us.

So, we improvised. Used what we had.

And the kids had a blast.

Turkey Treasure Buckets | Great Thanksgiving Activity for Kids!

We started with some copper-colored mini buckets from the bargain section of Target and a handful of clothespins.

We painted the clothespins with a variety of colors and sprinkled sequins over the wet paint to represent the turkey’s feathers. It was messy, but fun. My girls love painting.

And we only did one side. You could do both if you prefer.

I cut a quick face out of construction paper while they were painting, and they helped me glue on the eyes, beaks, and waddel. Then I hot glued the faces to the buckets. This was a sure way to keep them securely attached, but with an easy way to remove them later to reuse the buckets for another project.

Then, they clipped on the clothespin “feathers.”

Voila!

Turkey Treasure Buckets | Great Thanksgiving Activity for Kids!

Here’s a picture of my baby searching the backyard for treasures.

The clothes pins are a little heavy, but my girls wanted as many as possible. You could always use less if the weight is problem for you.

And here’s one of the buckets, filled with leaves and sticks.

They had so much fun with this. And they played with the buckets over and over, filling them with all kinds of treasures, including tiny toys.

And I had a blast watching them and helping them seek out fun discoveries in the backyard. It’s so great to spend some outdoors with my girls. I’m sooooooo happy that the coolness of fall is finally showing its face in Florida!