With Apologies to the UK

I’m sure you seen them; they’re everywhere. Everything from coffee mugs to t-shirts to plain old posters with the “Keep Calm and Carry On” slogan from WWII Britain. I have a little metal memo pad holder with it in my purse, and my favorite coffee mug bears the saying, as well. When I saw several tongue-in-cheek versions, I was struck with inspiration. Well, maybe not struck, but an idea popped into my head.

It took very little time to design in Photoshop Elements and I printed it at home on my photo printer. That was probably $25worth of ink, but I didn't feel like driving anywhere to have it printed. I framed it, put it on the entryway table, and it made the kids laugh. I’m pretty sure Winston Churchill would not have chuckled. Oh, well, you can’t please all the people all the time, right?

Then I realized it’s a perfect tag for a Thanksgiving gift. We traditionally make sugar cookies that look like turkey for Thanksgiving, using candy corn.

This is last year’s assembly area. We’re making these this weekend, then I’ll stack them in Chinese take-out cartons (not real ones, decorative, gift-wrap ones) and tie on the Gobble On tags. I think they’ll make great gifts for teachers next week. As I may have mentioned before, my hooligans get our money’s worth from their teachers…those poor souls deserve every treat they can get!

If you’d like to make these (my kids LOVE making them), just bake some round sugar cookies (I’m not ashamed to say I usually use store-bought). Melt a little chocolate in a ziploc bag, snip the end, and pipe a thin line about 1/3 of the way around each cookie. Add candy corn, then make a little royal icing, green and orange, for the feet and eyes. The icing isn't strong enough to hold the candy corn; hence the chocolate. You know I don't like chocolate, so I wouldn't use it unless necessary! Super cute, super fun. The drawback is that you can only use whole candy corn kernels, so someone must eat all the little broken ones. But I’m sure you can figure out a solution to that.

Enjoy, and hope you have a creative weekend!