Simple, Yet Beautiful, Thanksgiving Turkey Cookies For a Crowd

Hey Besties! Temperatures are finally cooling, and Halloween is around the corner, which can only mean one thing! It’s time to share these adorable Thanksgiving turkey cookies! Large enough to feed a crowd, with endless design options and crazy delicious, of course! Using one of my favorite cookie cutter sets that is versatile enough for any holiday! We’ll build the platter together, watch how to decorate and even package it! I’ll show you exactly how we package our cookie platter sets to keep them fresh, safe, secure and beautifully presented. This platter is the perfect ending to what is one of my favorite meals of the year! Let’s go!

Recipes

My usual go-to for Thanksgiving cookies is pumpkin spice, but this salted caramel cookie recipe has been such a hit this year, it’s my new Thanksgiving flavor for this year! It’s easy enough for a kid to make but is incredibly delicious, with a perfectly balanced sweet and salty flavor. That said, you’ve always got options! Take your pick from our growing cutout cookie recipe collection HERE. You can always play it safe and yummy with our vanilla cutout cookie recipe or WOW your family, friends and customers with a fun flavor!

For royal icing, you may already have a recipe you love and if so, stick with it! But if you need a fabulous recipe or want to try one that gives us consistently beautiful results and flavor, you can find it HERE. Cookie decorating is so much more fun when you have a reliable royal icing recipe you love.

Platter Cookie Cutters

We make SO many cookie platters during the holiday season and they are always a hit! And the best part of cookie platters is that you can make endless design options for any holiday, theme or celebration. While we have several sets we love, THIS set is one we can always go back to time and time again. With fun shapes that you can switch in and out, the options are endless! So, for today’s Thanksgiving turkey cookies, we used three cutters from this set, plus a basic round cookie on top.

I’ll admit, the first time you make a cookie platter, it’s kind of a math meets puzzle situation to figure out which pieces you want and how many you need. But once you make it once, you know exactly how to put together platters moving forward. I captured photos of each layer of our platter so you can see exactly how many cookies there are and how we built it. And the best news is that one batch of any of our cutout cookie recipes makes this full platter, plus a few extra! You know, because I’m bound to bump my finger into at least one while they are drying!

We use 12″ cakeboards for our cookie platters and we love the greaseproof ones that don’t soak up any of the buttery goodness or moisture from our cookies. It is specifically THIS set of gold cakeboards we regularly order and love for their quality.

Building a Cookie Platter

This platter ended up being 18 cookies in total and here is exactly how we built it before decorating!

Now if you use a different size cakeboard, you may have to play around with your shapes to determine how many cookies fit best. Or, take the easy route and use 12″ boards and copy our layout!

Decorating Thanksgiving Turkey Cookies

A big part of the fun with layered cookie platters is creating your designs! I love to mix and match different patterns using the same color palette to create a beautiful, cohesive design. This simple design used four main colors for the platter with a few tiny amounts of red, black, orange and white for the turkey’s face. I will say, you could swap out the turkey’s face for a plaque or Thanksgiving saying as well! I just loved how our cute little turkey face turned out.

And the decorating styles I used for this platter are very simple and perfect for any level cookie decorator! If you’ve been here before, you know that even the simplest designs and techniques can create some of the most impactful cookies! You don’t need years of practice to make beautiful and delicious cookies everyone will love.

I made a short decorating video so you can see exactly how I decorated each layer and the turkey’s face. You can find the video HERE!

Constructing The Turkey Cookie Platter

After all the icing had dried, we built our turkey!

Didn’t it turn out super cute?! I love it and I hope you do too! Now let’s package it!

How To Package a Cookie Platter

Besties, years ago, it took me A LOT of trial and error and research to figure out the best way to package cookies as a platter. I’m happy to pay this information forward so you can skip the headache! While almost all of our custom cookies get individually heat sealed, when you make a cookie platter, it looks best presented as a platter! You lose a lot of the effect if you have to deconstruct it and individually seal. Hence the quest I went on and I’m happy to report that I love packaging our platters now! They stay fresh, secure, safe and look perfect as they were designed to be! And you know what else? It’s actually faster to package this platter like this versus individually heat sealing each cookie. WIN-WIN!

And I have more great news…you just need a hair dryer and food safe shrink wrap to make this happen!

The shrink wrap we use is available from Michaels. You can find the exact product HERE. Like I said earlier, we tried several different products to successfully shrink wrap our platters and this product has hands down been the best. It’s easy to use, our platters look beautiful, and the cookies stay fresh. It is also easy for customers to remove to serve the platter.

And since I know so many of you prefer the ease of Amazon shopping, THIS is very similar, but it is in bag form. It may be easier to slide a platter into a bag and seal, or you could cut to the size you want anyway.

Watch & Learn!

Your first step is to lay a sheet of the shrink wrap over the platter. You’ll want at least a couple inches extra all the way around. Looks like this!

Then, you’re going to tape the edges of the shrink wrap underneath the board. It can just be loosely taped. I use 8 pieces of tape underneath the board. It will then look like this! Again, the shrink wrap is just loosely taped.

And from here, you can see how this works in action! I made a quick video showing exactly how to use the hair dryer to blow from the underside of the board to tighten the shrink wrap and secure your cookies in place. Note that you can make it as loose or as tight as you’d like. We like them snug and secure, but not tight so there is no risk of breakage. You can see the packaging video HERE!

Once we have our cookie platter shrink-wrapped, it’s as simple as placing it into a pretty box with some paper shred. We keep THESE 12″ boxes in stock to perfectly work with our cakeboards and to package loose individually heat-sealed cookies. If you prefer white boxes, we stock THESE too and they are a beautiful glossy finish! I can’t speak highly enough of these boxes. Seriously, they are SO sturdy and such great quality!

Here is our finished package! Of course, you’ll want to add labeling and can dress it up further if you’d like! We LOVE how beautiful these platters are presented and love knowing they will stay fresh, safe and secure.

I hope this post all about Thanksgiving turkey cookies has inspired you to create some delicious and fun platter cookies of your own! I know these will be popular for our bakery this season and am also excited to share one with our family as well!

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