One of my favorite childhood memories is baking cookies with my mom, and my favorite cookies to make with her were cut-out cookies! I tried to continue the tradition last year with Adelaide, but she was a bit too young to understand the activity. This year, however, she was ready!
The great part about baking cut-out cookies, is that it took us three days to finish the cookies, which meant I had an activity-a-day planned for Adelaide for three days! Perfect for our time at home.
Step One: Make the dough
I used a Betty Crocker sugar cookie recipe, which turned out pretty good. This is the first baking project I’ve let Adelaide help me with, and she did FANTASTIC!!! I measured out all of the ingredients ahead of time and then she got to put them all in the mixer and watch it go. She followed directions like a champ and was very careful and patient with the process.
Step Two: Roll out dough/cut out cookies
After refrigerating the dough over night, it was time for the fun part: cutting out the cookies! Adelaide is a big fan of play dough and uses a small rolling pin and cookie cutters regularly during play-dough time. So when she saw the pile of “new” cookie cutters, she got so excited, it was hard to contain her.
I couldn’t get the dough rolled out fast enough! Finally, though, it did get rolled out, and she had a blast playing with the dough and cookie cutters. We did wind up getting some cookies cut out and baked, but it took a while.
Step Three: Decorate!
The decorating step was kind of a miss for Adelaide. She kept asking for the cookie cutters! haha! I guess she really liked that part.
I mixed up some frosting using whipping cream, powdered sugar and vanilla, then divided it in to four baggies and colored the frosting with food coloring. The baggies acted like piping bags, which we tried to get Adelaide to use, but she wasn’t able to manipulate the bags as well as we were hoping, so we just squirted the frosting onto the cookies for her, and let her use a spoon to spread the frosting around.
She decorated six cookies and ate two before she got bored and asked to get down. All in all, I consider this project a success! I’ll have to see if there are other cookie doughs that can be “cut-out” so she can use the cookie cutters again.
Having her help me bake was such a positive experience that I’m excited to try it again!
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[…] One of my favorite Christmas traditions with Adelaide, has been making cut-out cookies. You can see previous years’ cookie-making here and here. […]