Kids in the Kitchen: Christmas Mice

Welcome to this edition of “Kids in the Kitchen” where I demonstrate how to put your kids in the kitchen, bake some yummy goodies with them, and still keep your sanity.  Well, sorta.  The jury is still out on that last point.

Yesterday we made some super-cute Christmas mice to take to our church Christmas program.  They were duly oohed and aahed over and consumed completely in about twelve minutes.  I found the instructions for these on The Pioneer Woman’s  new recipe sharing site, Tasty Kitchen.  Click here to see the original recipe.

To make the mice you will need a jar of maraschino cherries WITH THE STEMS.  Without stems you will have tailless mice, and well, that just won’t do.  You’ll also need some melting chocolate (we used  a whole package…12 squares…of chocolate bark), slivered almonds, Hershey kisses, a package of Oreos and some black gel frosting.

First you will need to melt your chocolate.  You could do this with a double broiler or on low power and stirring often in the microwave, but I just used a regular sauce pan on low heat and stirred it constantly.

The recipe I found on Tasty Kitchen said to use the entire package of chocolate, but I found it was almost double what you need.  I’ll show you another time what we did with the extra.

While I was busy stirring the chocolate, I set the kids to work unwrapping the Hershey kisses, taking the tops off the Oreos and finding good ear-like almond slivers.

You’ll also need to have your cherries drained and rinsed well.

When the chocolate was melted and nice and smooth, we formed an assembly line to produce the mice. 

First,  I would dip a cherry into the chocolate.

(Sorry that picture is blurry.  One of the kids took it, and I forgot to tell them to use the macro button.)

This is probably the trickiest step, only in that you need to be careful to not pull the stem off.  I found placing some chocolate in a large spoon and sort of rolling the cherry in it worked better than trying to dip the cherry.

After the cherry was covered, I would pass it along to Dirty Harry, who would place it firmly in the cream of an open-top Oreo, making sure to let the stem hang off the end of the cookie.   Then he would also put the head (Hershey kiss) in place (Turn the Kiss on its side and press the wide base end gently onto the cherry, on the opposite end from the tail).

Dirty Harry would then pass it to Bonny Annie for ear placement.  She simply took two similarly shaped almond slivers and would gently push them down in between the head and the body. 

We allowed the chocolate to harden for about five minutes or so, and then I used the black gel frosting to make the eyes and nose.

One jar of cherries will yield about twenty-five mice.  We had a few cherries that were too squashed to use, and there were also a couple that had lost their tails.  Er, I mean stems.

And then I dare you to try to eat one.  It’s really hard to get past the cuteness and actually down it.  A lady at church last night was taking hers home, wrapped in a napkin.  “It’s just too cute to eat,” she told me.  I just hope that she doesn’t sit it on a counter somewhere and forget about it because I think that might eventually attract the REAL thing.

Stay tuned for some more “Kids in the Kitchen” fun over the next couple of days!  My kids have been in the kitchen A LOT this week, so we have more ideas to share….