Cookie Monsters

Actually, they weren’t monsters at all. It all went much better than I anticipated.

One of the things I have to keep reminding myself about preschoolers is that their attention spans are, to be wildly generous, somewhat limited. A little bit of something is often enough, especially if it requires concentration. So they each cut out a couple of cookies and were happy to run off and do something else.

As far as decorating goes, both boys belong to the dump-everything-on-it-and-eat school, which makes fairly quick work of things.

Elias gave up on the process entirely and ate icing off the knife while pouring sprinkles straight from the shaker into his mouth.

I did the rest myself later (COF cronies will recognize the influence of Susan the Cookie Guru).

My biggest surprise with this recipe is that I actually want to do this again. I have had travails with cutouts, my friends. At one point years ago, I tried to produce a bunch of pumpkin cutouts for a church event. Tears were involved, and it’s possible that I threw things. I could not get that blasted dough (advertised as fail-proof – HA!) to work, and I ended up calling around to local bakeries to find one with a pumpkin pattern. My defeat was so complete that I left them in the bakery box when I took them to church and didn’t even try to pretend that I’d made them. And I told the event coordinator that I would bake her anything else that she wanted, anytime, but if she asked me for cutouts in the future, EVER, I would probably have to change churches.

(Kim, I am formally rescinding that statement. You’re no longer corralling volunteers, so I’m sure you don’t care. Just putting it out there.)

But I didn’t want to be the Grinchy mom who refuses to do cookies, so I decided to try again. I consulted Pinterest and Google, and found a recipe advertised as soft, delicious, and easy-to-work-with. Frankly, I was just hoping for the last bit to be true.

Unbelievably, they were delightful to work with, very soft, and pretty good to eat. Seriously. The only time there were any issues with the dough was when we* used a couple of cookie cutters that were super-fiddly, and we decided those are out of the rotation. Nobody really needs the reindeer antlers to be lifelike. At least nobody in this house. I did use a rolling pin that measures thickness for you, so they are all exactly even. I think that probably helps.

Recipe here, if you want it. I did change up the icing and used a family recipe instead. Mmmmm. Butter. You just can’t go wrong if there’s enough butter involved.

*My friend Jenn came over for a Cookie Extravaganza.