Melting Snowman Cookies - Shortcuts and Cheats (Kinda)

I know--two postings in two days; it's crazy for me!  But I actually have a spare moment while the boys are napping and Joe is glued to his Golden Eye Reloaded game and I figured I could quickly share this easy
cheat for melting snowman 
cookies.  I have seen these
all over Pinterest (here's a 
link to some directions at Crazy Domestic) and they're super 
 cute but I already had a plethora of ideas for Christmas treats this year.  I decided I'd save them for the January Awana bake sale at church, since snowmen are still relevant for January.

As it turned out, I did not know I would be in complete body-shut-down-hibernation-after-Christmas-recovery-mode the week of the January Awana bake sale.  I realized yesterday I needed to make these cookies for the sale today...and I didn't want to.  I normally LOVE baking and creating yummy treats for the bake sales, but I was dreading it yesterday. 

I decided I had to go to the grocery store, at least for the marshmallows, and maybe a bag of sugar cookie mix because I didn't think I had a scratch batch in me.  Then it occurred to me that my very favorite sugar cookies are the cake-like ones they sell at the grocery stores that are super moist and have that really nasty sweet frosting on top--yeah, I love those...

It occurred to me, if they happened to sell ones with white frosting, I could just use those and put the melting marshmallow on top and decorate from there.  Luck was with me.  They did have white frosted ones and even though they were covered in sprinkles, I bought them anyway ($2.66 for 10).  The only other things I had to purchase were the 
marshmallows (.98 a bag) and some black frosting ($2.07) because I'm not good at making black.  I have other frosting colors at home, and even if I didn't, I think I could have brought myself to mix a small batch of milk and powdered sugar together with a little food coloring.

I got home and scraped off the sprinkles.  They came off pretty easily and with a little swipe of my finger I re-spread the frosting eliminating the little sprinkle stains left behind. 

 

Following the directions I found on Pinterest, I pre-melted the marshmallows and stuck them on the cookies.  

 

A little black frosting piped on, along with orange for a nose and blue for some buttons finished them off.  It literally took me 10 minutes.  

I am a bit disappointed that I only provided 10--usually I would make a lot more.  There's no doubt that if I had made them from scratch my dollar would have gone a lot further.  $2.66 for 10 cookies did kind of hurt my feelings and this time around I just didn't have the budget for two boxes of them (yes, $5.00 is out my budget range right now).  Even so, I recognize that .26 a cookie is pretty good and using them as such a shortcut was worth sharing with everyone.   

If you're not a baker or just don't feel like baking, but you DO feel like providing some super cute cookies, give these a try!