Gingerbread Cookies

Since the Christmas baking season was officially opened with the first batch of gingersnaps being made the first weekend of December, my kids have been talking about making gingerbread men. Yesterday Emma helped me mix up some gingerbread cookie dough. We stuck it in the fridge and waited for Ian to come home from school to roll out, cut, bake and decorate the cookies. Ian and Emma took turns with my little gingerbread boy and girl cookie cutters, as well as a star cutter and my big gingerbread boy cutter. After cutting out the cookies and depositing them on the cookie sheets, we baked them up and waited for them to cool. After they were completely cooled, I frosted each cookie with vanilla frosting and passed them on to Ian, Emma and Zoe for decorating. I sat an array of colored sugars and Christmas themed sprinkles out and let the kids go to town. They each began shaking and sprinkling their tasty decorations all over the frosted cookies. Ian and Emma both asked if their cookies looked nice while Zoe kept trying to open new sections of her sprinkles can so she could add more sparkle to her cookies. Zoe got both of my variety cans covered in frosting from her cookies and giggled while she licked the frosting off the tops. Fortunately this is the third year or so for those sprinkles, so they were pretty well done anyways. I had to throw both containers away after Zoe's masterful decorating.

It took a lot of patience on my part to not clean up all the sprinkles as they rained onto the floor and not to tell the kids to use less sprinkles on the cookies as they coated every inch of frosting with non-pareils. It bugs the heck out of me when there is a lot of waste of sprinkles or other things like that. But I also know it kills the fun when mom tells the kids to use the sprinkles they've already spread all over the table. When I act like that, what begins as fun ends up as my kids saying they don't want to frost any more cookies. So , I bit my tongue and took satisfaction in the fact that I may have actually learned one thing in my six plus years as a parent. The kids and I had a ball, and the cookies obviously turned out beautiful!