On the holiday, young hands can stay occupied with this project — and the resulting turkeys make great placecard holders! Just tuck a little card, with each diner’s name, behind the turkey’s head. (Don’t do it too many hours before dinner is served, or grease will leach onto the paper!)
Photography © Kevin Kennefick
Turkeys
Excerpted from Candy Construction by Sharon Bowers
Copyright © 2010 by Sharon Parrish Bowers
Used with permission from Storey Publishing
What You’ll Need:
Nutter Butter cookies
Chocolate Mortar or 1 can store-bought chocolate frosting
Mini marshmallows
Mini chocolate chips
Candy corn
Red fruit leather or red decorating gel
Fudge-striped shortbread cookies (two for each turkey)
What to Do
1. For each turkey, lay a Nutter Butter flat on your work surface. For the eyes, put two dabs of mortar on one end of the cookie and press two mini chocolate chips into the wet frosting. For the beak, trim off the tip of a candy corn and mortar it in place. Cut a little strip of red fruit leather and glue it alongside the beak, letting it dangle down beneath to serve as the wattle. If you don’t have fruit leather, you can use a squeeze of red decorating gel.
2. With mortar, glue the back of the Nutter Butter to the front of a fudge-striped shortbread cookie. Use more mortar to glue candy corn to the back of the striped cookie. Place the candy corn so that the fat ends radiate outward.
3. With a thick dollop of frosting, glue the Nutter Butter and fudge-striped cookie in a standing position on a second fudge striped cookie that is lying flat. It helps to sort of nestle the rounded base of the Nutter Butter into the hole in the middle of the shortbread cookie.
Fun Variation: These goofy turkeys are even cuter if you have the brown “Indian corn” candy corn (with brown ends instead of yellow), which is sometimes available in late fall. (If you see it, stock up!) Or be sure to save some regular candy corn from Halloween, because Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.
This is one project where using a few dabs of peanut butter in place of frosting is fast, easy, entirely appropriate, and even totally tasty. Be sure to use creamy peanut butter, not crunchy. Also, do not use the natural kind, which is less sticky because it’s grainier and oilier, lacking the sugar and emulsifiers that smooth out other types of peanut butter.
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