Cookie time

One thing I love about the holidays is the excuse to bake a lot of evil sweet things and then unload them on Will’s classmates and our coworkers – while sampling plenty ourselves. This year we’re making gingerbread cookies, sugar cookies, candy cane cookies (less for their taste and more because it’s fun to roll out little red and white snakes and twist them into candy cane shapes), chocolate covered pretzels and magic cookie bars. Will has played lead baker much of the time. I mastermind the cookie production but leave most of the pouring, stirring, cookie-cutting and icing and sprinkle-applying to Will.

Our main difficulty is managing Owen if he wakes up from a nap when we’re still prepping cookies. Generally he climbs up onto the chair Will’s standing on, squeezes behind his big brother and starts grabbing for various cookie making tools, at which point I swoop him up and attempt to find something more interesting than cookie dough to occupy him. No easy task. Play dough on the floor just isn’t the same. A couple times I've just let him stand on a chair at the kitchen sink, pouring water between containers (and of course onto the counter and floor), rubbing bar soap on his hands and generally making a grand mess. All in the name of buying a few minutes of peaceful cookie making for those of us who can be counted on not to stick our freshly washed hands in our mouths and noses before handling the cookie dough.

After we'd finished most of our cookie-making, I read this Cookie Swap article in the Food Section of the Ledger with links to some tasty looking cookie recipes. I'd like to try the Persimmon Oatmeal Cookies with Coconut for a start.