Edible Holiday Gags

My wife and I often make Christmas gifts for family and friends. Sometimes the gift is a handmade book but it's more likely to be something to eat (on account of we like food). But whatever we do we try to be creative about it. My favorite gift concept was from a few years back when we made treats based a "Johnson Smith" style novelty theme. I've always liked novelties but the whole edible gags notion came about because I was in a novelty frame of mind after reading a terrific book by Mark Newgarden, Cheap Laffs (another great book on the subject is Life of the Party by Kirk Demarais and both are dang handsome volumes).

Because things are funny in threes (it's a comedy rule) we limited ourselves to the three items seen below (sorry about the crummy pictures, our first digital camera was pretty stinky). The three edible novelties were presented in a paper sack festooned with question marks in "mystery gift" fashion (a cloth sack would have been more authentic but we ran out of time) and I used vintage novelty art for the header cards.




I think that the Doggie Doo Cookies were the first thing we came up with. It was a natural and easy to do. As I recall, our kids helped and much enjoyed making edible "poo." Sadly, we overcooked the cookies a bit but they looked great.



We almost didn't do the Barf Candy because we were worried that the idea would seem too gross. Sanity prevailed. I spent a lot of time trying to get the right mix of smooth and chunky textures. You can't really see it here but the "barf" had a lovely green color and the minty white chocolate mixed with Heath bar bits was very tasty.



The X-Ray Spex cookies were my favorite because I thought my wife and I were pretty clever in coming up with an easy way to make dozens of them (we basically created a big, chilled x-ray spex loaf and cut thin slices off of it). The cookies weren't as fragile as I thought they would be and they turned out pretty yummy.