Traditional Thanksgiving turkey takes tremendous twist

Reporters pose with their turkey-shaped cookie, named Jim.

Too broke to spend almost $30 on a turkey this Thanksgiving? Want to make your aunts and uncles gasp with something more unconventional? We got you covered.

Having spent too much of our free time watching Tasty videos, we wanted to recreate a product similar to those from one of their shows, “Make it Big,” starring chef genius Alvin Zhou. In this series, Zhou makes normal foods huge, such as 50-pound pancakes and a 30-pound donut. 

Unfortunately, our kitchens lack the supplies to match the magnitude of our imaginations, so we searched for a recipe that we could manage with our resources. We settled on a classic — sugar cookies. With Thanksgiving fast approaching, we decided to test our limited baking skills with a giant, turkey-shaped cookie.

One Friday after school, we met at Nitya’s house with all our supplies and a recipe from the website Add a Pinch that promised us it was “the BEST chewy sugar cookie recipe!”

We began tossing our ingredients together, combining the supplies for the fantastic snack that we were about to make. The dough came together a little TOO easily. We knew that our master baking skills probably contributed to this, but we were still a little suspicious of what was in store for us.

We plopped the dough onto a baking pan and started to form our art. Pretty soon, it became apparent that the dough was too soft to shape, so we stuck it in the fridge and began working on the icing. 

Unfortunately, Nitya had limited decorations, and she was too cheap to buy store-bought icing or food coloring. The only color we had was green, and we had small sprinkles in red, pink, purple and green. We made the green icing as well as some melted chocolate for extra color, then turned back to molding our masterpiece out of the slightly-more-malleable dough. 

As we finished up the turkey-shaped cookie, both of us realized that we should quit our day jobs as students and take to the baking world. Our turkey had turned out magnificently subpar. In honor of its nature, we gave it a name to match — Jim. 

Finally, Jim was ready to take on the heat of the oven. We sent Jim in, fearful of what his growth might do to his shape. However, we knew that growing was inevitable, and we had to let our little turkey find his own way.

We impatiently watched Jim through the tiny window of the oven like parents peering at a sleeping child. All we could see was that Jim was looking a bit bumpy. His smooth cookie top bubbled and morphed from the shape of a turkey into an artistic blob. 

When we pulled out Jim around 20 minutes later, it was apparent that the thickness of the cookie was not even. The edges seemed a bit overdone, while the middle seemed to be just cooked. Nevertheless, we let our blob sit and cool.

Finally, we came to the step we had been waiting for: icing. We set to work, spreading the melted chocolate over Jim’s feathers, generously covering it with holiday-themed red and green sprinkles. Generous might have been an understatement for how many sprinkles we used, but art knows no bounds. We then set to work making Jim’s green t-shirt/dress/whatever turkeys wear that covers their whole body. 

Voila! Our “turkey” had come to life, and it now filled the 9×13 inch pan. It was now ready to be shared. We brought Jim to Newspaper to share our endeavor with the whole staff. 

Before slicing the turkey, our fellow editor, junior Manasi Garg, helped Nitya parade the turkey around the room for all of the class to see. Jim received mixed reactions, from shock to confusion to pride. 

Jim’s time came to an end as we cut him up into bite-sized portions for all to snack on. He may have been ugly, but in the end, taste is what matters. In our opinions, Jim was quite scrumptious, and definitely competed with an age-old Thanksgiving turkey.