Christmas Cookies

Saturday afternoon we had our annual cookie-decorating at Adam's parents. Sue and Kim were kind enough to bake all the cookies this year (mine usually turn out too thin and floury.)  If you don't like the word floury, discontinue reading this blog entirely because I use made up words and I use them often. Or oftenish.

Since I knew I wasn't going to be taking the cookies to work or anywhere else, I wasn't as picky on the decorating. Interpretation: the guys were allowed to frost. They did some of the "base coats" and Adam was slightly offended when he asked if he could do trees and I told him to "maybe start with circles and see how it goes." I think I was still remembering the night before when I had to walk him through the many complicated steps of making a grilled cheese sandwich. He was super-proud of his supper and said he was going to make grilled cheese and macaroni and cheese when he is home with Ryan during school breaks. I said, "Are you sure you can make macaroni and cheese?" and he said, "Well....Easy Mac." I told him maybe if we work hard we can get his skill level up to the box kind of macaroni and cheese by summer.

Anyway, the guys did circles and candy canes. (Kim and I secretly went back and fixed the candy canes later. I said I wasn't picky, but I'm also not blind.) Andy even tackled the snowmen and bells. Then Andy, Kim and I did some piping to give them all finishing touches aka coverups/distractions from the base coats.  A fun thing Kim did this year was to make a large "person" cookie for each of us that we decorated ourselves. See if you can "name that Boone" in the following representations. Here's a hint: we don't all have blond hair, but we didn't make any brown frosting. I am fully aware my cookie has fantasy hair--I am not completely dilusional. Another hint: Adam is not suddenly into spider-web looking dream catchers. He was attempting to represent the star with a "G" logo of his school's mascot.

We ended up decorating over 100 cookies using a double-batch of Grandma Lee's recipe and a triple batch of frosting, made with powdered sugar, butter, Crisco, vanilla, and almond flavoring. It is softer and shows knife-strokes, but tastes so much better than flooding cookies or making hard icing.

When we were ready to pack up and bring our share of the sugar-cookie splendor home, I was so happy to use this fun tote my mom gave me for Christmas last year. It is two boxes that snap together and the insert inside each box can either be used to store cupcakes without them touching, or can be inverted to make two layers for frosted cookies. It works perfectly!

Ryan was not much help frosting this year, but there was usually a person or two willing to hang out with him.

Decorating Christmas cookies is a fun family tradition and we are enjoying what's left of our take (down to 2 layers out of 4, but we did give some to our snow-blowing neighbor). Maybe Ryan can help next year!