Once the word leaked out at my daughter’s school that I decorate cookies and cupcakes and marshmallows and such things, it wasn’t long before I was tapped as a resource. My daughter’s teacher asked me if I’d like to lead a session with some kids in the school. I love kids, I love my daughter’s school, I love her teachers. So yes, of course I would. My task was to come up with a 50-minute activity for a bunch of three, four and five year olds. The catch: The school is a no sweets zone. And I’m all about sweets. And they just completed a whole lot of lessons in fruits and veggies and gardens and healthy eating. Sigh. So… no cookies, no cupcakes, no marshmallows? You see why this poses a challenge for me. Rather than even attempt a healthy version of icing, I just went with fruit and veggie decorating. We made silly veggie faces with tortillas and cut up vegetables, vegetable field scenes, and some yummy star, heart and flower fruit pops from slices of watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe.

I briefly (very briefly, it would be torture to make kids so young wait to play with food) introduced the concept of food as art, then we yakked about shapes. What shapes are on our faces, the shapes of the vegetables, and what might be used for what. The results? While the kids were way quicker with their creations than I anticipated, I was crazy impressed by their veggie face skills. Even the youngest of the group made clever faces, adding features I didn’t even consider, like eyebrows and mustaches. Of course! Eyebrows and mustaches. How could I forget those?  And I needlessly worried that the cookie cutters and fruit would take dexterity and strength they lacked. They wielded those cutters, melons and lollipop sticks like old pros.

I snapped a few photos of the veggie faces so you can see them in action. It was too hectic to get photos of the rest, so apologies for that. And while I’ll post pics of my own kid from here to Kalamazoo, I don’t ever post pictures of other people’s children without their permission, so I’m afraid the cute and smiley real faces have been cropped out of sight.

Some tips on what I did in case you’re asked to lead 20 three to five year olds in a healthy, fun food activity, too.

silly veggie faces

Start with mini tortillas.  I thought about slices of bread, but tortillas are much more sturdy to hold the veggies. Each child got a tortilla on a paper plate.

Ideas for veggies:  I used cucumbers (cut in circles or semicircles), cherry tomatoes (halved), baby carrot slices, carrot and cucumber and celery sticks, green peppers (great for smiles!), shredded cheese and alfalfa sprouts (great for hair!), provolone and American cheese slices cut with a cookie cutter and scissors into circles and triangles.

field-of-veggie scenes

We also made these field-of-veggie scenes. I drew a tree and meadow in each plate:

And let kids use broccoli for the tree leaves, cauliflower for the clouds, sticks of cucumber and celery for the tree trunk, smaller sticks of cucumber and celery for flower stems, and carrots and tomatoes for flowers.

melon fruit pops

For the fruit pops, I sliced honeydew, watermelon and cantaloupe, brought in a bunch of cookie cutters (smaller is better) and lollipop sticks and let the kids cut out their desired shapes and make pops. These they ate right away, so there was no evidence afterwards.

It’s not often I take a break from sweets, but every now and then it’s nice to play with other food.

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These garden cookies were inspired by this vegetable garden mini quilt featured at The Purl Bee last year. Dang, I wish I could sew. Yep, I don’t sew. I don’t garden either.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the concept of gardening. I do, really, and I wish that I had knowledge of how things grow because it’s beautiful and fascinating. But it’s just not knowledge I retain. Worse, plants seem to whither when I merely walk past them. And if I ever know you, do NOT ask me to water your plants when you go out of town. I’ll try and water them, I will. But I’ll do something terribly wrong and you won’t come back to your plants. They will meet their fates early.

So I leave our yard to my husband who knows more because his mom knows everything there is to know about gardening.

Keeping plants safe and sound on cookies is more my speed I think.

To make these, I cut out 2 1/2 inch squares from my cookie dough. I prepared royal icing, tinted blue and brown with Americolor Soft Gel Pastes (Sky Blue and Chocolate Brown). Then I outlined and flooded the top half with blue and the bottom half with green, and let the cookies dry overnight. Next, I tinted some fondant with two shades of green, off-white, white, orange, red and purple. Then I rolled out the fondant and cut out shapes for the veggies. I adhered the veggies to the cookies with a little light corn syrup, and let them dry.

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Feel free to share (nicely)! While my blog's photographs and text are protected by copyright, I do allow (and encourage) you to share ONE photograph with credit to "the decorated cookie" and link to this blog post. PLEASE don't reprint any part of the blog post and PLEASE don't post a photo without credit. Thank you!

This is totally not sweet at all, but just had to share with you… So the California Ripe Olives people sent me this super creepy (really, it had spiders all over it) box of Halloween goodies to help promote California Ripe Olives and create a Halloween dish with olives. I went the easy route and made googly-eyed crudites.

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Feel free to share (nicely)! While my blog's photographs and text are protected by copyright, I do allow (and encourage) you to share ONE photograph with credit to "the decorated cookie" and link to this blog post. PLEASE don't reprint any part of the blog post and PLEASE don't post a photo without credit. Thank you!