Yes You Can Costumes

Making the Extraordinary from the Ordinary

Marzipan Reed Flutes – Homemade Nutcracker

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My little woodland elves and I finished making their mitts and pins! It was time to dress up and celebrate outside, at the height of autumn. I will also take this opportunity to introduce you to some of our most beloved trees; both living and deceased. R.I.P.

Our birch tree is always lovely, but it is positively stunning in the fall!

The Japanese maple in our front planter makes a natural shelter that our kids duck inside and fondly call their “house”.

I made it even more homey with an arch made of a thrifted, silk sunflower garland and a beaded garland I found on Facebook Marketplace. I wound them onto two shepherd’s crooks and secured them with baggie ties.

Various pumpkins and squash from our own garden and some from family and friends decorated the bases of the arches. (I stole them from our own front porch display!)

Not everyone was a huge fan of the marzipan cookies we made for this homage to The Nutcracker Suite. Emma and Annika compensated by trying to eat all of them!

Oliver ran off from the group photo session and jumped on the swing. Sometimes, photographing small children is more like being a wildlife photographer than an artist. You have to just work with whatever the creatures ae doing in their natural habitat!

Our three, little, lady elves model their handmade mitts.

Considering our family’s large, musical instrument menagerie, it is rather surprising that we don’t own any flutes! Jeff’s clarinet is a reed instrument, but it didn’t suit the vibe I was going for. So, I chose a recorder as our token woodwind instrument for this photo shoot. (After all, the alternate name for the “Marzipan” piece in The Nutcracker is “Dance of the Reed Flutes”.

Everybody, grab on! I was going for an age-order lineup, but I decided to be happy that they were in a line, at all.

I’m pretty sure that Annika was plotting mischief in this photo.

After a bit, I took our operation to the backyard. This is what the back garden looks like in November! It’s a bit mouldery and spooky.

One, lonely pumpkin and skeletal, sunflower “scarecrows”.

However, there is always beauty to be found, if I look for it hard enough! We moved my little sunflower and squash arrangement by some wild grass.

Green is Emma’s favorite color. It suits her, don’t you agree?

Our munchkins with their “reed flute” and marzipan.

Annika took full advantage of this opportunity to eat as many cookies as she could!

This rainbow assortment of hand-made hats are all hand-me-downs from friends or the thrift store (Eliza’s).

Little Ollie Elf!

Action shots seemed like the way to go with our busy, little guy!

Elliott, the Elf Prince. He was perched on the remains of our giant fir tree that fell over on New Year’s Day, 2020. (We probably should have taken that as an omen.)

Remains of pokeweed in the foreground. It’s pretty, but obnoxious. I need to deal with it, this year, and I’m not looking forward to it!

Eliza was the Miss Congeniality winner of this event. She is a funny mixture of sweetness and seriousness, but she morphs into a goofball whenever I turn on the camera.

She is definitely our whimsical, fairy child.

It was fun to include the pumpkins that she and Oliver painted at preschool. This purple one, decorated by Oliver, just happened to match the color palette I chose for this project!

Mitt models . . .

At some point, we will need to remove this enormous log. In the meanwhile, the kids enjoy climbing on it.

Those large, silvery-sage green rosette plants are Great Mulleins that I transplanted from family property at Lake Chelan. Their frosty, fuzzy leaves looked enchanted next to my green girl!

The layers and textures of the costume pieces we put together turned out just as I had hoped.

Autumn always makes me think of cozy colors, layers, and textures. Perhaps like the layers of the colorful, falling leaves.

And . . . JUMP!!!

Our dogwood trees are also well beloved by our children. They are gorgeous in any season: Flowering in spring, apple green leaves in summer, red leaves and berries in the fall, and shapely, bare branches in winter.

That’s what I like about them, anyway. If you ask the kids, they will tell you that the dogwoods are special because they are perfect climbing trees! We have one with white blooms in the backyard, and one with pink flowers in the front yard.

Annika was not about to be left behind! She managed to scramble to the first fork in the tree.

The cold was finally getting to us. See her pink, little nose?

We went inside to get warm right after these pictures were taken. I hope that these cozy, cheery colors, and woolen accessories warmed your heart as well!

In an upcoming post, I’ll show you how I put together the entire outfits for our Woodland Marzipan Elves. Almost every article of clothing was already in the kids’ wardrobes!

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Marzipan Cookies – Homemade Nutcracker

*Purchasing through my affiliate links earn me a small commission to keep creating!*

If you’re like me, you’ve heard of marzipan but had no idea what it was. It sounds like something fanciful and tricky that only a pastry chef would use. To my surprise, I learned that it is an easy-to-make, almond “playdough”. It can be eaten as-is or incorporated into other recipes.

Woodland Marzipan Elves with marzipan cookies.

In fact, during my research into the treats represented in the Nutcracker, I learned that many old-fashioned European, Middle-Eastern and Asian sweets incorporate almonds. This makes sense. Almonds would have been commonplace in the Middle-East and Asia and a real treat in Europe.

It takes inspiration to try something new, like making marzipan. What a better place to find it than a book? Our days begin and end with cuddles, and the kids love it when I read to them from The Story Orchestra: The Nutcracker. Here, you can see Emma’s enthusiasm for the project. Making yummy, nutty cookies sounded like a good idea on a crisp, autumn day.

Eliza added the rose water to the food processor.

I found a promising recipe on Pinterest: BEST Marzipan and Almond Paste Recipe. In keeping with many other old recipes, marzipan calls for rose water. I made my own, this summer, and froze portions in muffin tins. (I’ll go into that in depth when we tackle the Waltz of the Flowers.)

Emma learned to separate egg whites from the yolks like a champ!

We kept some of the marzipan out for the cookie recipe. Then, we formed the rest into a log, wrapped it in plastic, and stuck it in the fridge. This German Mandelhörnchen recipe came from the same site as the marzipan one did. It sounds very legit and Nutcracker-y, doesn’t it?

Mandelhörnchen – The Daring Gourmet

Annika loves playdough, so she got right into the marzipan cookie action! The cute aprons were from Ikea.

These cookies only required a few other ingredients, aside from the marzipan. The final steps were rolling the dough into little logs, brushing them with egg whites, rolling them in sliced almonds, and bending them into “U” shapes on the baking sheets.

The other kids ditched us for this part, but Emma stuck with me. We baked the cookies and decided not to dip their ends in chocolate. Don’t get me wrong…We love chocolate! However, chocolate + costumes = BIG no-no! Maybe I’ll get around to adding the chocolate to the leftover ones, at some point.

And, here are our little Marzipan Elves enjoying our marzipan cookies! Well, Emma and Annika enjoyed them. Elliott, Eliza and Oliver weren’t into them.

Whatevs. More for those of us with good taste! Amiright? Speaking of taste, these cookies have a consistency between a sugar cookie and a shortbread, and are richly flavored with the heady, almost-floral taste of almonds!

Look as those lovely, wool mitts! Would you believe that they were made from old socks, scraps of trim, and vintage buttons? Well, be on the lookout for an upcoming post, and I’ll show you how the kids and I made them!

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