Destination Imagination: Turkey Edition

For almost all of elementary school, I participated in the program called Destination Imagination. This program involved being on a team of other students and creating skits and doing improvisation activities. The objective is to develop creative problem-solving skills, and looking back, I feel like I have really benefited from it. (If they offer it at your kids' schools, I highly recommend looking into it!) One thing my team did every week at our meetings/practices was find ways to creatively interpret the end-of-meeting snacks. For example, if the snack was Tootsie Rolls, we would go around the circle and everyone would say something that their Tootsie Roll was, i.e. a log on a fire. I introduce with this information, because I was able to put my D.I. skills into action this week!

Last week, I volunteered to plan Family Home Evening for my group this week because I thought that it would be fun to make the chocolate turkeys that my family makes every year on Thanksgiving. Though a good concept, the execution tested my creative problem solving skills to the max! The supply list for this project is fairly simple, requiring Whoppers, red decorating gel, chocolate frosting, and chocolate stars. I forgot in my planning that the chocolate stars, which are crucial to the composition of the turkeys, are tricky to find. We find ours at an over-priced, obscure grocery store near our house, and I was hoping to have similar luck out here. I hoped in vain. Charlotte sent me to Allen's Family Grocers, which is more ghetto and sketchy than obscure, and they had nothing in the area of chocolate stars.

I'm a "Can-Do" person, so I didn't give up hope. Rather, after asking a couple workers about the stars and realizing that they had not such thing, I returned to the candy aisle and let my creative juices flow. What could be used as or turned into roundish, flats disks of chocolate? I started by grabbing a bag of miniature Reeses, which I figured could be cut in half to produce the desired thickness necessary for the turkeys. I then selected a bag of Hershey's nuggets (you know, those little rectangles of milk and dark chocolate, Krackle, and Mr. Goodbar?) The chocolate is soft enough that I decided that they could be used to carve out the round base and back of the turkeys. My friends weren't sold on that one, but I had confidence in my plan. Finally, I found some chocolate covered gummy ring things in a box up front, so I bagged about a pound of those. These turkeys would not be classic Wood Family Thanksgiving turkeys, but they would be inventive, unique turkeys.

As is to be expected by any circumstance which involves sixteen college freshmen and a table full of chocolate, we didn't end up with many actual turkeys, but some very creative chocolate sculptures. Jace made a tractor, Greg made a snowman and a Christmas tree, (note how these are both guys) and the other guys mostly stood around eating the Whoppers. It was fun though, (not to mention delicious) and I considered it a success. Displayed below are my attempts at turkey creation with my limited supplies, and I don't think they're half bad!

This was made by slicing a Reeses in half horizontally.
It looks more like an oyster in my opinion.

This is an example of carving a rectangle of Hershey's milk chocolate into a circle. This is probably the closest thing to the real deal.

This was my attempt at being creative with the chocolate covered gummy rings. The ring is on the bottom and what looks like a run-down fence behind it is Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate trying to look like feathers.