Animal Crackers

The other day I stumbled across How Sweet It Is, and proceeded to spend way too much time bookmarking things that I want to make really really soon.  When I saw the animal crackers, I knew that I needed to devour some immediately.  Finding the cookie cutters turned out to be a real big hassle, but I was determined to not pay shipping and handling. I abandoned Alex in Game Stop, and then drove like crazy to every home goodsy store in the area trying to find these silly cutters.  Eventually I encountered them (at Joann Fabric), and almost accidentally walked out of the store without paying because I was so frazzled from the whole ordeal. These are good considering that they are one of the healthier recipes that I found for animal crackers, but I'm still on the hunt for a better one.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup oats
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 4 tablespoons buttermilk (I used 4 tbsp of skim milk mixed with 1/4 tsp vinegar)
• Natural cane sugar

Grind up the oats, I used my awful and noisy blender.
I then dumped the ground oats into my mixer bowl, and added all of the other dry ingredients.
Once they are all blended together, add in the vanilla extract, honey, butter, and buttermilk separately and blend until that ingredient is fully incorporated into the mixture. 
Cover the mixer bowl and place in the fridge for a while (~30 minutes).
Sprinkle a pastry board with flour and roll out the dough to a relatively thin layer.   Add flour to the top of the dough if it sticks to the rolling pin.
Then stamp, stamp, stamp!  Make as many animals/boats as possible, then peel out the excess dough, roll it out, and make even more animals/boats!  Sprinkle/pound some natural cane sugar into the animals. 

Bake in the oven at 400 degrees for about five minutes.  I used my pizza stone to bake the crackers, even though my stone is broken in half :(.

Consume.