Turn your cookie cutters upside down!

As the holiday season approaches, my thoughts always turn to cookies. I have very fond memories of baking and decorating dozens of cookies with my sister, Cindy. (If Cindy reads this, I expect she will astutely point out that she did most of the baking… I mainly did the fun decorating part!)

We had a wonderful cookie cookbook, the 1963 Betty Crocker Cooky Book:

Each year, we made the Chocolate Crinkles (Cindy’s favorite, as I recall) and Ethel’s Sugar Cookies (my favorite). It was easy enough to locate the pages for those recipes… They were wrinkled and flour-stained from years of use. Decorating the sugar cookies was my favorite task. I would meticulously find curved red sprinkles to make mouths for snowmen. Tiny round quins were eyes. Silver dragees were tree ornaments. And Rudolph’s nose was a cinnamon “red hot” candy.

We had a collection of about a dozen favorite cutters, including wreaths and stars and camels and candy canes. My cookie cutter collection is now much larger, but I still enjoy finding new uses for the cookie cutters in my collection.

One favorite trick of mine, is to turn the cutter upside down and try to figure out a new new design for it, from that perspective. Here are a few of my “double-duty” cutters.

First, a cookie cutter that was sold as an ice cream cone. But it is now one of my favorite Christmas cutters, reinterpreted as an elf’s face.

Next, a snowman cookie cutter that can also create cute baby shower rattles.

A cowboy hat can also be a frog…

And a diamond can also be a boat… or a Superman symbol!

A chalice/goblet can also be a dress…

And an acorn could also be a baby’s face!

A Halloween headstone could be an ice cream sundae…

… and a bat can become a princess crown!

So pull your cookie cutters out and look at them from a new perspective. And get the family together to make some cookie-baking memories. Happy baking!