Cow cookie cutter Pumpkins

Kids and mallets, mallets and kids. What a combo!  I still remember well the time I walked into the backyard to find Jason with a pile of metal and wood at his feet; he explained he'd been "fixing" his bike with the mallet.  Neither the bike nor the mallet survived that fix, as you might have expected.  Still, no children were harmed in that particular mallet adventure.

And that's kind of one of the nice things about mallets, that they "whack" things softly.  When my latest eight-year-old friend told me that he and his mom would using mallets and cookie cutters to carve pumpkins, I immediately saw the appeal.

In fact, I stopped at a market to get a pumpkin for myself, and pulled out some of my fave cookie cutter shapes (indeed, some of my only cookie cutter shapes) and did some whacking.

The verdict?  I have to say, it was highly satisfying -- it's a fun way to carve.  I do think it's something I'd trust to children or other human beings who might not be ready for sharp knives.  Aesthetically, it came out much more clean and decipherable than my usual attempts; I'm an enthusiastic, but not particularly elegant, pumpkin carver.

Those are the plusses.  A minus is that my particular pumpkin seems to be rather thick skinned (perhaps many pumpkins are fleshy that way).  So the cookie cutter couldn't make it all the way through the pumpkin into the hollow middle, and I ended up using a knife anyway to cut things within the cookie cutter, releasing a bit of pumpkin pressure.  Also, my star cookie cutter apparently was designed for pressing gently into soft cookie dough and not for pounding gleefully into hard gourds, and it required some post-pumpkin bending and clamping with my pliers.  (It survived the mallet more successfully than Jason's poor bike derailleur did). 

But back to the plusses: did I mention that the carving came out well?  It did!  I have a pumpkin with star eyes and a cow smile.

It goes well on my porch with all of my cows, some of which are currently dressed as ghosts or witches.

The chalkboard on the left asks,
"Do cows say 'boo' or 'moo'?"

I'm looking forward to the trick-or-treaters coming by; I'm giving out themed pencils, as I usually do, and having a jar of dog kibble that the kids can feed to Prewash.  

And, I'll be on the lookout for mallet-bearing bike fixers.  Happy halloween!