Christmas Cookies 2014

Who likes frosting? This guy!

We did several rounds of Christmas cookies this year.  Adam's mom and dad graciously baked our traditional recipe cookies and I had some from a school fundraiser, so they came over one night to frost them with the boys' help. I think the boys had a great time (especially with the sprinkles) and I had to let go of my desire for them to be perfect and beautiful. I think we all had much more fun that way.

Adding mini M&M ornaments to a tree

Sprinkle Extrodinaire

A good chef tastes as he goes.

Fun night of cookie frosting!

Boys got their own box so they could eat the cookies with questionable knife-licking practices.

Some of the completed cookies

More cookies of all shapes and colors

Of course, the "must make pretty cookies" part of me eventually won out and I made my own set of cookies for a few other events.  First, for a women's ministry cookie-exchange event at church, I tried out "flooding" for the first time. I used this recipe for cookies and it worked so well, especially since the dough doesn't have to be chilled before rolling it out. I also love the almond flavor. I used this recipe for frosting and found it to work well also (I used almond flavoring again).  Here are the snowflakes and snowmen cookies I shared with my work team and brought to the cookie exchange.

Cookie exchange table.

 On a side note, this was a fun event at church with over 50 ladies participating. You could sign up to learn arm-knitting or to paint a canvas (guided by one of the local elementary art teachers). I had a lot of fun painting this canvas and it's currently in Avonlea's room.

I signed up to bring cookies to Ryan's preschool open house, so I did one more round of cookies using the same almond sugar cookie recipe and frosting. I tried to keep it simple with just 1 icing color and it still turned out nicely and were popular with the kids at preschool. Good thing I kept a few at home for us!