Witch Hat Cookies

Like some of the other projects that the kids and I have done in the kitchen, I can't take credit for coming up with this idea. (I saw a picture floating around Facebook a while ago.) But I can take some of the credit for how adorable my kids are, so at least I have that. :)

We thought these looked like a really cute Halloween treat, so of course we had to try them out. They're fairly quick and simple to make (although, as you'll see, it didn't turn out to be quite as easy as I thought it would be. But apparently that's a fairly standard occurrence around here.) Even so, they still turned out cute, and we still had fun, so we're still going to call it a win.

We start with simple enough ingredients: Keebler Fudge Stripes cookies, Hershey's kisses, and some frosting. I went wacky and got two different types of the cookies (original and dark chocolate), two different types of Kisses (original and pumpkin spice), and two different colors of frosting.

Now, the first step in the process - laying the cookies out on the tray to decorate them - was the one thing that I thought would be the simplest. Unfortunately I was oh so very wrong. The cookies stuck together - horribly. So we ended up with several broken cookies before we were done. On the upside, broken cookies taste just as good as unbroken ones, so who cares if we didn't get to decorate all of them?

I thought maybe it was just a problem with the dark chocolate cookies. But no. The other ones stuck together even worse. It was a little frustrating, to say the least, but once again the kids were happy about the prospect of all the broken cookies they'll get to eat later.

Eventually we managed to get enough cookies to come out of the package intact so that we could start putting the "hats" together. First, the frosting.

Next came the Kisses. (The kids were very excited to finally have a job of their own, and took great pride in carefully unwrapping each Kiss.)

At this point we decided that the pumpkin spice Kisses were a little too orange, and wouldn't really go with the cookies, so we scrapped that idea and decided to just go with the chocolate ones. And just like the broken cookies, the kids were more than happy to dispose of the unused Kisses. (Once they're unwrapped, they have to be eaten, right?)

Finally it was time to put it all together - another job that the kids took very seriously.

And, as usual, they were very proud of the finished product.

So yes, these were slightly more time consuming than I had expected, but not enough to be a problem. And above all else, those two beautiful smiles make it all worthwhile. You just can't argue with results like that. :)