I've been making peanut butter and jam sandwiches for a pretty long time. Like ages and ages. I'm pretty much a cave woman of peanut butter sandwiches. I've made them on white bread and wheat bread and bread straight from an oven. I've tried raspberry and strawberry and grape jam and even went through a wild, rebellious phase in college and went for honey while I dyed my hair purple and listened to music that encouraged me to make irrational choices. Luckily, I found myself and some homemade strawberry jam before completely losing my mind and falling under the spell of bananas and marshmallow cream.
I could make peanut butter and jam sandwiches in the dark. I could make them sleepwalking. I can make an entire loaf of bread into sandwiches in under two minutes. (Use a spatula instead of a knife. Trust me.) I make peanut butter and jam sandwiches for breakfast and lunch and dinner and snacks and picnics and for saying, "Good job not getting in trouble for throwing play dough across the classroom again today." When my children turn three, they begin their peanut butter and jam apprenticeship. They start with retrieving the bread and then work their way up to actual spreading and... when they are really and truly ready... they are allowed to flip the peanut butter slice over onto the jam slice.
And then my peanut butter and jam world collapsed. Last Tuesday. At 4 pm. I discovered that it is *possible* and in some places even acceptable to SPREAD THE JAM BEFORE THE PEANUT BUTTER!!! What is this world coming to??!! Everyone knows that you spread the the peanut butter first so you can wipe the knife on the clean slice of bread before dipping it into the jam container. Don't you? I mean... do you know this? Is this common knowledge?
I'm a little lost. And kind of heartbroken. I'm not really sure where to go from here. I guess... I could just show you how to make some cookies. Some grapes cookies. My very favorite-of-all-time grapes design cookies.
First, you're going to need to make some of these little gems. Use a #3 tip and some purple icing and pipe a bunch of grape size dots all over some wax paper. You can make them in neat lines if you want, or just put them all over the place like I do. I used about 8-10 of these for each cookie. You should make more than that though, because they are kind of fun to make. Let them dry for a day or two. Use a sharp knife to pry them off the wax paper.
1. Use 20 count purple icing and a #3 tip to pipe grapes all over the cookie. Make sure they don't touch each other. They're probably not that good of friends, really. And you don't want to have to turn the car around and go home. Let them dry for 30 minutes at least.
2. Start filling in as many of the spaces as you can between the old grapes. Don't let the new grapes touch each other either. Let these grapes dry for an hour or so.
3. This is where things get tricky. And fun. Fill in all the rest of the spaces. It's okay if they touch and get wonky.
4. Immediately start covering the fresh icing with your grape size dot transfers. Add more icing and transfers wherever you need more grapes. Add a stem with green icing and let dry overnight.
And this is my absolute favorite part. Dust the whole cookie with pink luster dust to give it a depth of color. I love these grapes. I want to eat them right now. I wonder if there is any possible way to make the icing taste like grapes. Or grape jam. Oooooh....I could make peanut butter cut-outs and grape jam flavored icing on top. It's genius!! That's enough to make me forget the peanut butter and jam sandwich tragedy now.
Which is great because I also wanted to tell you that you can hop over to The Cookie Cutter Company's Design Ideas section to see how I made the rest of these fruits and vegetables.
Either way... HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
