Honestly it wasn't my idea to have 10 kids decorate Christmas cookies.
With sprinkles.
That's right, sprinkles.
But, the Advent calendar said to invite friends over for a Christmas tea. Well, since kids don't typically drink tea (I blame it on us not being English), I thought we probably needed to have an activity.
What can you do with kids that is fun and festive?
Well, decorate cookies of course!
So the day before all the friends were to come over I whipped up a couple batches of cutout cookies. We like ginger bread and sugar in this house. I went on Pinterest to find some new recipe's. I am always looking for that perfect one that will become the traditional holiday recipe.
You can find the recipe for the sugar cookies here. I really like this recipe. The dough was really easy to work with, rolled out well, baked well, and tasted good! I added a tsp of almond extract to the dough for a little added flavor. I would definitely use this recipe again.
The ginger bread recipe can be found here. Hunky Hubby is the Ginger bread connoisseur around this house. He gives this recipe a thumbs up. It also was very easy to work with and roll out.
But this story isn't really about the cookies. It's about the decorating!
Frosting is always a challenge. I really like to pipe the frosting on the cookies. It gives you more control and enables more elaborate designs. So, I thought we'd pipe the frosting.
However, I forgot to give the kids a class on how to hold the frosting bags. After all, when I asked them if they knew what they were doing they all said that they knew how to pipe frosting! Well, we ended up with a few messes like this:
In case you were wondering, the frosting is not supposed to be oozing out the top like that. One of the bags actually popped and oozed 'cookie monster' blue frosting all over the plate Wyat was decorating his cookies on. Thanks to the Mommas that were here, we got the messes cleaned up and decided to ditch the piping method and just let the kids have at it with butter knives.
There was much merry making and I even heard a kid or two say "I'm never going to forget this!" Does it matter if they said it after the frosting explosion?
Cookies were frosted, sprinkled, and eaten. I even offered them tea! They had hot cocoa instead.
These girls were cookie decorating diva's. They decorated at least 2 dozen cookies apiece. I gotta get me a couple girls!
My sons only decorated enough cookies to eat before they went outside to play.
And the results of all that frosting and sprinkling?
Beautiful, creative, cookie masterpieces.
Now now, I don't want to discount the boys in this group. They did a fine job too.
One of them came back inside and started decorating again, sprinkling away to his hearts content. In fact it's hard to find the cookie underneath all those sprinkles!
It really was a fun time.
The kids had fun, which was my goal, and the moms had fun, even with the messes.
My only regret is that we couldn't have all our friends over to decorate cookies.
But come on people, I am not a saint!
Didn't you hear me say sprinkles!
(did you know dogs don't lick sprinkles up off the floor? How annoying!)
We were able to send plenty of cookies home with our friends. And we still have plenty of cookies left to eat! I have a couple of volunteers to help with that.
We just might have to make this a holiday tradition. As long as I mentally prepared for the chaos and mess before hand, I was able to handle everything that came our way. Although, I wouldn't have wanted to do it without the help of my fellow moms.
Maybe you would like to host a cookie decorating party of your own? It doesn't take much, just some cookies, frosting, and friends.
Merry Christmas!!
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