Cookie Dough Characters for Any Holiday or Occasion

There are lots of things that remind us of holidays: gingerbread, candy corn, pumpkin pie - but nothing quite says "holidays" like freshly baked cookies. Whether it's Christmas or Easter, cookies can liven a party, or put the homey touches on the holiday table. Cookies are usually inexpensive, easy to make, and always delicious.

Ordinary cookies are great but ones cut with shapely cookie cutters are even more festive and impressive. Know what's even better, though? Baked cookies shaped like reindeer, turkeys, Easter bunnies and other holiday characters.

No, you don't have to go purchase even more cookie cutters to have the special occasion cookies. Simply form them yourself. By forming the cookies yourself you can make them huge or tiny, plus you can make shapes that aren't available in cookie cutter designs. And shaping the cookies yourself means you can make individual cookies, or one giant cookie which people cut off sections of (for instance, a skeleton at Halloween).

You can form and shape the cookies in several different ways. You can roll the dough flat - whether it's dough you've purchased frozen or dough you've made yourself - and use a knife to cut an outline. Use other utensils, such as a fork, to make designs like stripes on pants.

You can use cookie cutters, too, if preferred, then add your own touches, like a hat or a pair of boots, which the cookie cutter didn't offer. You can also roll the dough into balls and form the design you want. Rolling the dough in tiny balls, then snuggling them next to each other to form the character, can give a much more interesting look to the cookie than ordinary flat cookies have.

For Thanksgiving, try pumpkin shapes, leaves, "hay people", and gourds. For Christmas, make trees, Santas, reindeer, bells, presents or stockings. Easter shapes can be bunnies, baskets, eggs and giant jellybeans.

To decorate the character cookies try things like raisins, chocolate chips, candy sprinkles, cinnamon, powdered sugar, jellybeans, tiny cinnamon candies, drops of liquid chocolate, tubed icing, licorice or gum drops.