Imitating Nature with Children

Today we are honored to have The Sleepy Time Gal join us to share one of her special treats with us!  We love her photography and creative, original ideas for children and families!  

-CK

There is so much inspiration to be had from nature's bold and beautiful fallen leaves.  I gathered my most favorite ones from a morning run one day and landed the pile right on my kitchen table.

What better inspiration to use in creating our very own gingerbread leaves?  

We had gingerbread dough chilling in the fridge and decided to copy our beautiful leaves' colors and patterns as closely as possible.  Here's what to do to create your own gingerbread leaf cookies designed by nature.

1. Make gingerbread cookie dough.  This is my favorite recipe.  

2.  Roll out your dough and use leaf cookie cutters to cut out leaves based on the real leaves you're modeling them after.  We had mostly maple leaves.  

3. Line cookie sheets and bake cookies.  

Now for the fun part!  

4. Using food coloring, make a variety of colored icing following  closely to the reds and yellows as seen in your real leaves.  I also made a brown icing since it was a color found in most of the leaves.  This was a fun opportunity for the girls to help me match the colors of the icing to the colors in the leaves.

5. Ice the cookies.  We used everything from the back of spoons, children's knives, to tooth picks.  The girls soon discovered the magic and beauty of mixing colors.  As they mixed their icing cookies became more realistic to the leaves they were copying!  Orange was discovered as they mixed red and yellow and veins were drawn on using a tooth pick to copy exactly what they saw. 

6.  When all the edible artwork is complete, sit back and observe.  Observe the resemblance of your leaf cookies to the real fall leaves.  Every leaf was different and beautiful in its own way.  This was one of our favorite fall time memories this year, especially once we dug our hands into the cookie jar!   I hope you try it with your family. 

-The Sleepy Time Gal