With my nephews, I really make an effort to give them gifts that are not just things you buy in a store. I love to share an experience with them. We've gone snowboarding, checked out museums, gone to Disneyland, etc. etc. This year, I decided to make stain-glass cookies with them.
I was inspired by my many friends who bake and a Martha Stewart cookie recipe that sounded ridiculously easy. I believe that was the flaw in my logic. Martha Stewart makes everything sound easy and assumes everyone is at her skill level. My baking skills are limited to the tubes of cookie dough you find in the cheese and yogurt aisle. More often than not, those end up as burnt chocolate-scented hockey pucks. Despite this, I thought baking cookies with my nephews would be an awesome idea.
Franky and I went to the store to buy some cookie cutters and ingredients. I made the executive decision to take a shortcut and buy sugar cookie mix. Franky chose a house-shaped cookie cutter and mini-gingerbread man cookie cutter. He said he wanted it to look like someone was in the house. I was impressed with the concept and we went with it. Here's a pictorial of our cookie-making.
Things started out well-enough
I made the dough according to the instructions on the bag. Easy-peasy
Because I'm a bit OCD, I had the boys separate the Jolly Ranchers needed for the centers by color.
Franky took his job VERY seriously.
Ethan also "helped" {In Ethanland, help = eat every other piece of candy}.
He even has a piece of candy in his mouth in this picture.
Franky then broke the candy into pieces.
He enjoyed this a little too much and busted through the bag.
There is a huge time lag between these two pictures... like a 30 minute time lag. I had a heck of a time trying to cut the houses out of the dough. I had to roll and re-roll the dough. I dusted the cutter with flour as recommended on the recipe. No luck. I ended up with crooked, Hurricane- Katrina-demolished houses. The boys were getting impatient. So, I just decided to use them as-is.
Ethan was in charge of cutting the men out of the houses. He did a REALLY good job of this. My 4 year-old nephew is better at cooking-cutting than me. How sad.
The real fun started when the boys started filling the spaces with Jolly Ranchers.
The funniest part? After all that color separating, the boys used mix colors in each space.
They went into the oven.
They came out of the oven looking like this.
I waited too long to take them off of the cookie sheet. They had cooled too much and stuck to the cookie sheet.
They ended up looking like this.
They tasted MUCH better than they looked. They tasted so good that Ethan ate almost an entire cookie sheet of cookies when we weren't looking. He subsequently passed out from the sugar crash. {Sorry, Cathee}. We had fun... even if our cookies were nowhere near magazine-worthy... and that's really all that matters.
1 more coherent thought(s):
as long as they tasted good that's all that mattters
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