Sunday, December 5, 2010

Turkey Cookies

Seeing as Katie is letting me write some of these blog posts, I feel that I should issue the following warning: The opinions, circumstances and details expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Katie (or the actual truth, for that matter).

Contrary to what you may be thinking based on the title, we did not make cookies out of turkey. Though that may have been easier than what we actually did. Katie has a knack at picking out the most difficult recipes/activities for us to try. This episode of "Frustrate Craig through Cooking" dealt with making frosted cookies that look like turkeys (see Figure 1, although I think we needed to take the picture from a more over-head view to really see what it is).

The cookies, the frosting, and most of the decorating wasn't that bad. The infuriating part was making the legs for the turkeys. This required the precision cutting of pretzels to form something that looked like a leg and feet. I don't know if we picked a bad bag/brand/style/whatever of pretzels, but I cut ~80 pretzels (breaking most of them) to get about 14 usable turkey feet. Needless to say, Craig was not a big pretzel fan by then end (see Figure 2). (Not a very intimidating picture. Note to self, use bigger knife for next deranged serial killer picture.)


Not all of us were unhappy with the turkey cookie making, Lucas benefited and really enjoyed himself!

Christmas at the Mall

Craig here finally doing my dues on the blog. I've been busy the last year or so with my candidacy exam, but now that I've passed and it is behind my, I'm helping Katie catch up with the blog.

Our local mall (the amazing Nittany Mall, don't blink or you might miss it) had its Christmas kick-off the weekend before Thanksgiving. They had fun and games for kids and promises of Santa Claus showing up. We decided to take Lucas and get out of the house. The best part of the whole experience was the fact that Lucas was more interested in the guy dressed up as a Nutcracker than Santa Claus and the reindeer hat the Christmas Magician made for Lucas.

Art Museum

For playgroup Lucas and I went to the Art Museum on Campus. It was interesting and something different to do. The lady that gave us our tour was really good with the kids and making it kid friendly. She even brought a special friend to assist her on the tour, it was an ostrich hand puppet. It was fun to take Lucas to the art museum, which is something I would not normally do. Lucas did pretty well, considering he stayed in his stroller the entire time, due to the fact I did not want to find out what kind of mischief Lucas could get himself into.