cream cheese penguins

My friend Jean went to a Super Bowl party and we got to make penguins for the event! In this batch we had football players, refs, cheerleaders and spectators.

Jean printed out a picture of a football field and we put that on some foam board and wrapped it in green plastic wrap. The players have cocktail onion shoulder pads, the cheerleaders have parsley pom-poms and the spectators have carrot flags.

Next time one team will wear green olive heads. Or one whole team could be made of green olives! And perhaps a tiny carrot bikini top held on with a dot of cream cheese over the middle of it, for the cheerleaders. Anybody have other ideas on how you can decorate football penguins? Feel free to comment below.

If you like these, you can get the recipe and more details here.

We went over to Gramma & Aunt Susie’s house for Christmas, and this year Aunt Susie requested cream cheese penguins, so here’s what we brought!

This batch was fun to make. The hats are fashioned from grape tomatoes… I cut the pointy part off, scooped out the guts with a knife, dried the inside with a paper towel, and pre-poked the hole in the top so they didn’t squish the head down too much. They made great hats and they tasted good, too!

In case you’re interested… see the recipe and more pictures.

And here is the 2010 batch of Christmas penguins! We made a grape tomato Santa, celery sleigh, reindeer and penguin children.

Note to self for next time… group them into distinct crowds! This would have looked better had I done that. Also don’t forget the dabs of cheese on top of the hats. I took the cream cheese with me, intending to do it once they were set up, and I forgot. Doh!

The reindeer antlers are carved from horizontally cut carrot slices – about 1mm seems to be the optimal thickness. We had some trouble with the heads getting split if the antlers were not thin. I laid down two slices and cut both at once so they would match.

About 6 man-hours of work went into making this batch of 70 penguins.