I’m usually pretty good at eyeballing and copying things. I can typically study something crafty or artistic and make a passable copy of it. One year I even made a Thanksgiving Turkey out of a cantaloupe based on a tiny picture I found on the internet. This skill apparently does not extend to Thanksgiving cookies.

Earlier today while searching online for Thanksgiving desserts I found this picture:

The instructions said, more or less, “make cookies, add Reese’s Pieces, wrap in a green Fruit Roll-Up.” I can do this!

Here’s what I started with. Note that no store in a 50 mile radius of me carries green Fruit Roll-Ups. We found two alternatives. One was “wacky fruit stripes” that had red, green, yellow, and orange stripes. Susan thought we could just cut the green and yellow sections out and use them. A second stop revealed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Fruit Roll-Ups — and they were green! Surely one of these would work!

First, I would need the cookies.

As you can see, I’ve never made cookies before. These look terrible. They don’t look like corn cobs at all. They look like piles of raw McFlesh or something. Had I studied the source picture more closely I would have realized that those cookies were much, much smaller. Oh well, I was sure these would work. I handed the tray to Susan and said “make these into cookies!” and she did by placing in the oven and later removing them.

Susan’s suggestion was to make one prototype and then do the rest assembly line style. That sounded like a plan and so I took one of the cookies, covered it in icing (white icing from a can with a few drops of yellow food coloring added), added the Reese’s Pieces and the green Fruit Roll-Up and… oh my.

There are so many things wrong with this dessert that I’m not even sure where to begin. For starters, it looks like an alien fish caught in a lettuce wrap. I didn’t overlap the candy like they did on the original, which makes the candy look more like buttons than corn. Oh, and this was actually the smallest cookie in the batch, as most of them were made to the “corn you get at the fair” scale. I also realized after making one that I did not have enough green Fruit Roll-Ups to make a dozen cookies, so I broke into the TMNT Roll-Ups…

…which are covered in Turtle Tattoos. Are you kidding me? Susan found that if you soaked them in water for a minute you could somewhat squeegee the words off by running them between your fingers (or at least smear them to the point of illegibility).

This is me, soaking strips of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Tattoo-covered Fruit Roll-Ups in a bowl of water attempting attempt to remove the writing and make them look more like corn husks. The camera built into the iPhone is pretty amazing but I’m not sure it truly conveys how disgusted I was with the whole project at this point. Maybe it does.

This shot shows that the table looked like at this point. I really wanted to capture how much effort went into making the dumbest Thanksgiving cookies ever. This was taken probably two hours into the project.

At least the final product would look like oh dear God what are those?

Great Jehoshaphat they look like candy remote controls served as week-old sushi. This is not what I had in mind. Again, the source photo:

Mason said it best when he came downstairs, took one look at the tray of cookies, and said to me, “They look great, Dad. What are they supposed to be?”

Oh yeah.