Reporters attempt to recreate Thanksgiving Pinterest treats

It was us vs. dozens of Thanksgiving-themed Pinterest recipes, and we were the clear underdogs. With Elizabeth’s mom as a semi-professional Korean chef and Caitlyn’s sister a baking goddess, we were raised in households where we learned how to eat, not cook.  

Nonetheless, when we saw Pinterest’s beautiful pictures of pumpkin truffles and cute wide-eyed turkey cupcakes, we knew we had to give this baking project a shot. So on a Friday after school, we raided Caitlyn’s kitchen and began our baking adventure.

We thought we were easing into the challenge when we started with the no-bake turkey oreo-and-pretzel snacks. Little did we know that only 3 minutes in, Caitlyn had already messed up.

To melt the bowl of chocolate chips, she threw in half a cup of vegetable oil, only to find that the recipe actually read half of a tablespoon. Oops. In an effort to save the drowning chips, Caitlyn frantically ran to the sink and poured/filtered out as much oil as possible.

Luckily, when we melted the mixture in the microwave, the result wasn’t too tragic, although the chocolate was still covered in a little too much oil.

We proceeded to dunk oreos and pretzels into the chocolate and to put them in the fridge to dry. While waiting, we started on the most time-consuming recipe: the pumpkin bread truffle.

Mixing all of the ingredients, we ended up with a batter that was more like soup than like dough. We stuck the watery batter into the oven and started decorating our oreo-and-pretzel turkeys. Unfortunately, the hardened chocolate stuck to our drying rack, so many of the oreos and pretzels broke in the removal process.

They still turned out pretty cute. But if you tried lifting one up to eat, the turkey might lose a few “limbs” (pretzels) and “feathers” (candy corn).

With the oreo-and-pretzel turkeys finished, we started on the wide-eyed turkey cupcakes, sponsored by Pillsbury white box-cake mix.

After only 15 minutes in the oven, the cupcakes were done baking, and we were ready to decorate them with our homemade cream cheese frosting. In the end, we created something that vaguely resembled the original Pinterest photo — a big turkey face with frosting eyes dripping down and a candy corn nose that was awkwardly angled.

With hope that the pumpkin bread truffles would make up for our mediocre cupcakes, Caitlyn took out the pumpkin bread from the oven, excited to see that the soup-like batter had actually risen and become a moist bread. Elizabeth began using a spoon to form small truffle balls out of the bread. To our surprise, the bread tasted quite good.

We formed four pumpkin bread balls and began adding our orange and green candy coating to make them resemble pumpkins. Since we did not have legitimate candy coating, we used leftover cream cheese frosting and added food coloring.

Elizabeth began by dunking the bread balls into the orange cream cheese, only to find out that the cream cheese was not opaque enough to cover the bread. The frosting oozed off the sides as bare spots of bread became visible. Left without a choice, we poured on orange cream cheese and splattered on chocolate to add to the visual appearance, making them look more like tiger balls than pumpkins.

Despite the not-so-visually-appealing results, we found that spending time making treats was a fun way to take a break from junior year stress. Caitlyn decided to eat the no-bake pretzel turkeys around two days later out of curiosity in its taste and found them to not be too bad. In the end, we decided that our inept baking skills were confirmed and had a great time rolling on the floor, laughing at our failed creations.