Halloween Fun

This week the kids had a carnival for which I volunteered (read: was cornered) to make 5 dozen cookies. I decided to make a day of it and have some fun and school at the same time. Tons of math: halving recipes, counting dozens, grouping by dozens & counting extras. Reading: recipe. Art: Cookie decorating. We did our reading and spelling assignment to keep up with the week, but the rest of the day was cookies!

The Recipe Reader

The Pourers

First we mixed up these Sugar Cut-out Cookies so the dough could chill in the frigde for a while. We did half of this recipe and got probably 20 pretty big cut outs and a little extra dough for sneaking. They turned out pretty sturdy, but I have learned from my baking past to always grease the pan for cutouts, even when the recipe says not to. We let the dough chill for about 3 hours while we baked the other cookies and had lunch.

I wanted to do the shape cut-outs, but I knew that decorating them with icing would be too much for me. So we used candy corn and chocolate chips and inserted them as soon as they came out of the oven. Lazy, but still cute. Eyes on the moons and ghosts are pieces of candy corn. The ghosts were my favorite.

Then we made these easy Ghost Cookies. We used Vienna Fingers instead of Nutter Butters because of Ashton's peanut sensitivity.

Finally we ventured into Martha Stewart world with these Pumpkin Whoopie Pies. I shied away from choosing them at first, but they turned out to be pretty easy. The batter is pretty runny, but it bakes up well. And adding pumpkin to the filling makes it separate a bit, so if that bothers you skip it. I also added more powdered sugar to the filling.

This pic was when Landis found a way to look at the counter full of cooling cookies. I was so excited to be almost done, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product!

All in all, a fun day, and educational to boot!