A Cat, Bat & Ghost Walk Into A Bar...Stop Me If You Heard This One
Written: Jul 17 '03 (Updated Aug 04 '03)
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Pros: Ten shapes to work with, durable, comes with a pumpkin storage container.
Cons: Some cutters are a little hard to work with until you get used to them.
The Bottom Line: Spook up your holiday baking with Wilton’s Jack-O-Lantern Cookie Cutter Set
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| Freak369's Full Review: Wilton Jack O Lantern Canister Cookie Cutter Set 2... |
The Wilton line of products are amongst my favorites to work with when baking for any holiday. From Christmas to Valentine’s Day, The 4th of July to birthdays – there’s always something with the Wilton name that you can use to make the event a little more memorable. As you may have gathered from my recent reviews, Halloween is something that we really enjoy in this house. For me, I get to try out new recipes and create spooky treats and the brood never pass up a chance to taste test my efforts and give me some honest feedback. Making cookies has become a family venture and everyone gets involved in mixing the dough, pressing out the cookies and decorating them before and after they are baked. Sure it’s messy and I usually have to spend a few hours cleaning up, but we do have a lot of fun in the process. Since boys will be boys I try to have tons of plastic cutters on hand for them to use, we work with some of the metal ones but when they start goofing around I get a little worried that the metal ones might start getting tossed around and end up hurting someone. This means that I can’t have just one pumpkin or ghost cutter – that would surely result in a war. Besides, it gives me a valid reason to add to my cookie cutter collection.
Wilton Jack-O-Lantern Cookie Cutter Set 2304-1035
With this set you get ten basic Halloween cookie cutters that range in size from two inches to a little over three inches with the biggest being the tall pumpkin, witch and moon and the smallest being the word “BOO”. This makes a great starter set for someone just getting into baking but since there’s a lot of variety to the cutters, people who have a lot of Halloween shapes and cutters can also benefit from it. These clean up easy, are pretty sturdy and are well worth the suggested retail price. To make the deal even sweeter, you get a very cute pumpkin to store them in [read more about that below].
Cookie Cutters
For the most part, the cookie cutters in this set are awesome and have just the right amount of detail to them to produce great looking cookies. The trickiest ones to work with are the spider web and the witch, these need a little extra care when removing the cutter from the dough as well as when transferring them to the baking sheet. Move them around too much and the cookie gets distorted and looks pretty funky when it’s baked. If you do goof them up a little you can always do a touch up with icing and sprinkles or leave them out for the “quality control team” to test out. The one negative about this set is that it only has one word cutter, “BOO”. Several of the other sets I have other words like “EEK!” and of course “Happy Halloween”. This set has two different shaped pumpkins, one tall one and one short, fat one. I would have rather had another word cutter included instead of one of the pumpkins but since they have different facial expressions and shapes, I guess I can live with it.
Even though I don’t like cats, I have to admit that the cutter in this set is pretty darn cute – and scary too! The design is simply enough but has just the right amount of detail to it. It’s fairly easy to decorate but I usually add some black tint to a small part of the cookie dough and make these and the bat ones separate from the others. Top it off with some gray piped icing around the edges and a small red candy for an eye and you have one devilish looking kitty. For the two pumpkin cutters I add some orange tint to the dough and watch them like a hawk when they are baking, cook them for a minute too long and they turn from a nice orange to an icky looking brown. The tall pumpkin has a mean grimace while the short fat one has a pleasant smile. These are so easy to decorate and are one of the favorites for the kids to play around with. Give them a disposable bag of icing and let them frost away; there really isn’t a way to goof up decorating the pumpkin cookies so these are the best, from this set, for kids to work with.
The ghost and skull / skeleton head are a nice size to work with and come out of the mold fairly easy providing that you give them a nice dip in flour and tap off the excess before pressing it into the dough. Since there’s some facial detail to the skull I use a stiff stenciling brush to clean out any left over dough between pressings as well as to make sure the flour gets into the small sections. This might take a little more time when pressing out cookies, but you won’t have to worry about them falling apart or having the dough stick to the cutter. My two favorite cutters from this set have to be the bat and the moon. You might not be able to see the detail of the moon, but right inside it there’s a small bat flying around. This one is probably the hardest to decorate and get out of the cutter in one piece – but the end result definitely justifies all the work.
Jack-O-Lantern Canister
When I first saw this sitting on the shelf, I wasn’t aware it was a cookie cutter set – all I saw was the cute orange pumpkin with its toothy smile and the words “Sale” right above it. To be truthfully honest, I could care less what it was – it was on sale and it was a Halloween item. When I saw the hang tag in it and the Wilton logo, I knew I hit the jackpot – something on sale, Halloween related and and Wilton product. The pumpkin was never used to store the cutters but instead was filled with candy and used on the dining room table as a festive but functional decoration. It’s about the size of a mini basketball – five inches all the way around. While this might be sold as a way to store the cutters that come with this set, it simply takes up too much room on the shelf. You are better off storing them in a plastic bag until the season arrives and using the pumpkin as a decoration instead of a cutter keeper. On a side note, there is a recipe included [basic sugar cookie] with this set but I prefer to use a shortbread or alternative sugar cookie recipe to get the best results.
Care & Cleaning
These clean up easily but I usually soak mine for a few minutes in warm soapy water and make sure there aren’t any pieces of dough stuck in the creases. A small finger brush works great to scrub over the detailed sections to make sure they are free of any dough. Air dry them and store them in a plastic bag or in the provided pumpkin. As I mentioned, the pumpkin does take up a little bit of shelf space but if you have a lot of room in your kitchen then this won’t be an issue for you. I’ve only had one of the cutters get destroyed and you can thank the garbage disposal for that.
The Bottom Line
Since I collect cookie cutters I get rather picky about the ones that I work with but as a whole this is really a nice set with a lot of variety to it. If you are looking for a set of plastic cutters that are inexpensive, durable, have a good bit of detail to them and will hold up to lot of use, I highly suggest that you check out the Wilton Jack-O-Lantern Canister Cookie Cutter Set. You can pick up this set for about $5.00 or try to catch them when they go on clearance after the holiday.
If you can’t find this at a local cake and bakeware store, you can always visit the Wilton Online Store, type in the product code - 2304-1035 – and go directly to the product page.
As always, thanks for the visit …
^V^ Freak ^V^
© 2003 Freak369
Other Halloween baking and decorating reviews..
~^V^~ Wilton Spooky Cookie Cutter Set ~^V^~ Wilton Dancing Skeleton Baking Cups ~^V^~ Wilton Halloween Mix ~^V^~ Wilton Black Colored Sugars ~^V^~ Wilton Mini Pumpkin Pan ~^V^~ Wilton Copper Halloween Cutters – Set of 6 ~^V^~ Wilton Mini Ghost & Pumpkin Candy Mold ~^V^~ Wilton Tombstone Candy Mold ~^V^~ Wilton Mini Ghost & Pumpkin Candy Mold ~^V^~ Wilton Jack O Lantern Canister Cookie Cutter Set ~^V^~ Wilton Singles Bat Mini Pan ~^V^~ Wilton Singles - Ghost Mini Pan
Thanks to Mind-full for adding yet another Wilton Halloween product to the database for me!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $5.00
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