25 Days of Christmas: Day 18

For day 18 of my 25 Days of Christmas challenge, I made reindeer and melted snowmen cookies. As you can see from my previous posts, there are a lot of cute options for both reindeer and snowmen when it comes to holiday baked goods and crafts. Although I could have made these two separate days, I decided to combine them under a holiday cookie post.

Ingredients for Reindeer:
Your favorite peanut butter cookie recipe
Chocolate covered pretzels, white chocolate covered pretzels or regular mini pretzels
M&Ms - red and green ones or red and brown ones
Icing 

To make reindeer cookies, first make a batch of peanut butter cookies. You can use your favorite recipe or buy a mix or roll of pre-made dough. Once you take the cookies out of the oven, immediately press m&ms into the cookies. Use brown or green for the eyes and red for the noses. Then put the cookies on a rack to cool. I had originally read to also press the chocolate pretzels on immediately too but after trying this with the first two, I realized the pretzels were melting and looked sloppy. So I decided to wait until the cookies cooled and then "glued" the pretzels on for the antlers using a dab of white icing. If you're just using regular pretzels, you can probably press them in when you do the m&ms. I had a bag of white chocolate covered Flipz and a box of mini Godiva chocolate covered pretzels. I made a batch of each. I like the way the Godiva ones look better because they are smaller but I also really like the way white chocolate looks.

Ingredients for Melted Snowmen:
Your favorite sugar cookie recipe
White icing
Large marshmallows
Orange jimmies
Green, blue or black jimmies

These snowmen cookies are one of my favorite things I've ever made. They are just so darn cute! First start by whipping up a batch of your favorite sugar recipe, or buy a mix or pre-made dough. Once the cookies are cooled, cover each cookie with white icing. Next, place your marshmallows on a plate and put them in the microwave for about 20 seconds. I read a tip that you should coat your hand in cooking spray to help handle the marshmallows when you take them out of the microwave so I gave my hand a coat of Pam. Next take the slightly melted marshmallows and place them near the top of each cookie. Next decorate with jimmies. My bottle of rainbow jimmies didn't have any black so I picked out enough orange for the noses and a combo of blue and green for the eyes. I then took a bottle of Valentines Day sprinkles I had and picked out brown heart shaped ones for the buttons on each snowman. Place the buttons on the icing and press the nose and eyes into the marshmallow. The great thing about these is that they are supposed to look like melted snowmen so they don't have to be perfect at all when icing or placing the marshmallows and jimmies. Sloppiness just adds to their charm and helps them look more melted!