Who wants to make a cute and festive little sweet treat? The best part about the holidays is that you can work with themes that really don't fit with the rest of the year, like turkey everything. We are some turkey handprint making fools in this house. Did you see the Thankful Turkey-hand Garland? Pretty cute, right? Making holiday crafts is my favorite and we always try to do something new each year. This year the garland and of course these awesome little sugar cookies. I had watched an episode on Food Network where the person was having a birthday party for her daughter and they were making edible decked out sparkle hands. I have not seen this idea out there with turkey handprints, and so the inspiration began.
This was by far the craziest cookie making experience to date. So let me tell you about what happened. I got all of the recipe ingredients and measuring cups all ready and pulled the cooled cookie dough out the fridge. I put around a tablespoon or so of dough on the parchment paper and tried to flatten it out.....a big sticky situation. I sprinkled a little AP flour on the surface of the dough and flatten it a little. I called the kids over so they could press their handprints into the dough. I then attempted to trace around their hands with a plastic knife...a big mess. At this point, I started to wonder what the deal was. Normally if the dough is sticky like that you need more flour. I grabbed my measuring cup and decided to measure a 1/2 at a cup at a time...then another and another. The measuring cup was a 1/2 cup measuring cup. Then it hit me- I used the 1 cup measuring cup for the oil and grabbed the 1/2 cup measuring cup for the dry ingredients and completely forgot. Yes, I put half of the flour the recipe called for. Obviously this was the reason why it was so sticky...and the hand print shapes were so difficult to manage.
You know what? I cooked them suckers anyway. They tasted just fine and I went for the second run of turkey handprints. I had previously read that the egg tempera was nasty to others and they had issue of thickness and it had no taste. I fixed that by adding a teaspoon of sugar in each dish and the kids finger painted the hands and they were perfect. We cooked them and they didn't blow up like before. Not literally blew up, but overly puffed. I would say this was a fun success!
This is the result of the crazy recipe...with half of the flour.
Oh....we put a little candy eyeball in when it was cooked 1/2 on the second go. The first ones were put in when the cookies were put in the oven and you can see they completely melted into the cookie. The other thing we added was the gobbler on the face.
Don't you just love how vibrant the colors came out? I was super surprised in how bright it came out after it baked. We did traditional food coloring colors....5 red, 5 blue, 5 green and to get the orange we did 3 drops yellow with 2 drops of red. What do you think? Easy enough to make and have fun with. My kids enjoyed adding the food coloring and whisking with the mini whisk. I do want to point out that I was afraid that the food coloring would instantly stain skin and my ramekins, but we had no issues what-so-ever!
I have to show you this cute little turkey craft my sister did with my nephew and niece. I will called it a 'Southern Turkey'.....I mean it really doesn't get more southern than red beans and rice. They used a printed coloring sheet- glued red beans, rice and bird seeds to make their bird. She used the USA pins as a cute little addition.
