Uncle Sam Cookies

I made it pretty clear a while back that I am no longer in my twenties. You might have missed that...but now you know. And since that is the case, you can be sure that I've been through A LOT of Independence Days in my life. When I was a child, they were filled with pancake breakfasts and probably candy.

And then I got older and things got more exciting when people started setting themselves on fire. I even got to see what happens when you light fireworks and throw them under water. (Which is probably a really bad idea because I'm sure it killed fish. And I had guilt for kind of a while after that.)

Ooh, and one year they cancelled the fireworks show literally 20 minutes before the start time and told everyone to RUN to their cars. (It was a small town so there was absolutely NO NEED to worry about stampede dangers.) But I didn't make it and I got pelted with golf ball size hail. Didn't expect that one. And that was the summer that the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" came out where the world nearly ends right after golf ball sized hail comes around. So..you know, on the way home I was pretty sure I would never seen another 4th of July again.

And now my Independence Days are chronicled in cookies. I'll call this "The Year of Unconventional Cookies Wherein I Also Made an Uncle Sam Cookie." You can call it that too if you want. I didn't like, copyright it or anything. But...you will have to make the cookies. It's super easy. Mostly.

You need two cutters for this cookie. A scalloped(ish) cutter and a rectangle cutter. See that weirdy part of my scalloped cookie? It's because I only own ONE scalloped cutter and its pretty small. So I tried to make one. And I got impatient to make this cookie so I didn't actually glue it together before using it as a cutter. I don't think that will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me.

Cut a chunk out of the scalloped cookie with the rectangle cutter. (I always feel so disturbed when I talk about cookies that way. I promise -- I'm seriously a cookie lover not a hater.)

Put them together on your baking sheet and kind of mush them together so they are snug. It's cool if your rectangle gets all lopsided on the journey over to the baking sheet. It's in good company with all my rectangles.

Bake them all up and let them cool. Then pipe the brim of the hat in navy blue. Or just regular blue. Or whatever type of blue you enjoy. (Cobalt blue anyone?) Let that dry for awhile. Especially if you went with navy because that always seems to bleed more than regular blue.

Do the red stripes up the hat next. And let those dry. While you are waiting, you should really think about eating some watermelon. Because I sure won't be. They are $20 each here. And maybe I'm idealizing the good ol' US of A since I'm gone...but I remember watermelon being closer to $5 last year.

Whoa. Anyway...after you've felt bad for me and eaten as much watermelon as you can possibly stand..go ahead and do the white for the hair and the beard. Actually, you could probably do these two steps at the same time. But then you would miss out on all that watermelon. (And the cracks in the brim part? I may have dropped this cookie while trying to take a picture of it. Don't eat this one.)

Fill in the face and ears and do the white stripes at the same time. (See? I can DO more than one color at a time.) But definitely let those dry again before moving on to the face.

The last step is drawing on the face. It seems that Uncle Sam always has a, umm, well, a real big nose, so I went with that. I piped 3 dots for the eyebrows and let them melt together so there would be some kind of texture to them....but I'm pretty sure that a straight line would look almost exactly the same. Then I added some rosy cheeks because I felt a little bit bad about the whole big nose thing.

Georganne
Georganne

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