Pinterest Insanity

This is the picture I posted on Facebook at 1:30 this morning with a caption that read, "1st grade snack time was so boring before Pinterest". Yes, perhaps boring but also a LOT less complicated. Did you notice I said I posted this in the wee hours of the morning? That's because this snack (the one that would be devoured by 18 hungry 1st graders in less than 2 minutes leaving nothing but a few crumbs with no trace of its former glory) took this insane mama over 2 hours to make. Grrr! How do I get myself into these projects!?!?

I'll tell you one reason why these 18 tiny reindeer and 36 frosty snowmen kept me up so late was because I knew that this project wasn't going to be exactly easy. As I made up the kids' "guinea pig" batch of donuts Monday evening, the black icing wouldn't stick to the powdered sugar and make cute little dots. I tried. And tried again. I gave up. I rummaged around my baking drawer and came up with a half a tube of black decorator's gel. I somehow managed to produce 9 Frostys that actually looked like snowmen. I carefully covered them with plastic wrap and hoped they'd still look like Frosty the next morning.

In a throwback to all of those "Not Me Mondays", I most certainly did not write "A Frosty Breakfast" on a slip of paper and tuck it into the kids' advent sock for Tuesday morning. Upon the kids reading their clue, it definitely wasn't me who produced a plate of sugary goodness, a plate of mini Frosty the Snowman faces (9 to be exact) and served it up for the kiddos' breakfast. All of the Christmas tinsel and glitter and bows would have definitely gotten to me if I had let them wash it all down with glasses of egg nog. So I didn't do that either. 

I reanalyzed and reprocessed and rethought the icing that defined Frosty's facial features ALL. TUESDAY. LONG. I knew I couldn't use the gel (it wouldn't dry and I risked smearing everything into a big black mess) and I had come to the conclusion that the icing I had mixed was too thick and therefore too dry to stick to the powdered sugar coating. So I decided that when whipping up the next batch of icing for the snack day Frostys, I would just make it not quite so thick and hope for the best. All of this to say I knew it wasn't going to be a simple assembly. So I procrastinated. For several hours. And despite "powdered sugar icing and how to get it to stick to a powdered sugar donut" being the focus of my day's thoughts and my attempted trouble shooting of the problem, I still ran into difficulties during the actual making of the snack day donuts.  Thus my insanely late night. Thus my late night of insanity. All in the pursuit of the ever~elusive title of "Wonder Mom". 

Let me save you some time and frustration by offering you my tried and true good~enough~for~who~it's~for "Reindeer and Snowmen Donut Assembly" instructions for you to follow. Or don't and come up with an easier and better method. But share it with me! (The reindeer were a last minute snack menu addition and assembled relatively easily.)

You will need:

2 bags of powdered sugar mini donuts, 1 bag of chocolate minis, a bag of pretzels, red hots, candy corn, powdered sugar, and black food dye. 

For the reindeer:

1. Mix up some powdered sugar with a few drops of warm water for the icing (sorry, no exact measurements but don't make it too runny) put it in a ziplock baggie and snip off a small hole in the corner.
2. Pipe out eyes onto donuts, let them dry for 10 minutes or so.
3. Add some black food dye to the remainder of your white icing and use this for the pupils (ziplock baggie again, but with a smaller hole). 
4. The reindeer noses are red hots, I wasn't sure if they'd stay by themselves in the donut hole so I secured them with a bit of the white icing. 
5. Antlers are just broken bits of pretzels (you can stick them right into the top of the donut). 

For the snowmen:

1. Finally, after lots of trial and error, I ended up taking a fork, dipping the tines into black water (water mixed with black food dye) and lightly poking the donut (to make a line of 4 dots for the mouth).
2. Take a tooth pick, dip the point into the black water and poke it through the individual donuts for the eyes and 1 or 2 more mouth dots to even out the smile. 
3. The nose is just candy corn. I cut the white tips off at an angle so it would look more like a carrot and stuck the yellow end into the donut hole. 

3 bags of holes made snacks for 18 with each child getting 2 snowmen and 1 reindeer. Snack time might be more fun now, but it's also a LOT more complicated;);)