I’m not a good cook. My hubbie is the cook in our family, or, rather, he is the CHEF. He’s amazing and I’m not motivated to go head to head with his skills. It’s fine by me. I like to bake. Sometimes.
Now that Bean is in preschool he is anointed with the “star of the week” title about 3 times during the school year. As part of the fun, he has to bring in a toy and a book to share each day. He loves it. He gets to show off his collection of trucks and cars and books that he loves to read. On Friday, he has to bring in a special snack to share with the class. When I think “snack”, I think apple slices or peanut butter crackers or popcorn. But I quickly learned that when the kids think “snack” it means cupcakes, cookies or brownies. SUGAR, basically. In the fall we made cupcakes with leaf sprinkles. They were a hit! Yahoo! This time Bean wanted to make sugar cookies.
I loved the idea because the letter they were studying last week was “S.” So we decided to make SUGAR cookies in the SHAPE of STARS with SPRINKLES!
Easy, right? Well, not for me, the amateur baker mom. I know I need to amp up my baking skills since I soon will have TWO kiddies in school. I didn’t go all homemade but I did buy the sugar cookie package instead of the “bake and break” variety.
The tough part turned out to be the star shapes. The dough was a bit sticky so pushing the cookie cutters on the dough and then trying to lift up each individual star shape was not working. Bean and I used our creative skills and made each one directly on the cookie sheet. It took longer, but it worked!
I found this recipe for the sugar cookie icing. I give it two thumbs up. The icing was smooth and shiny. We used paint brushes to spread on the icing. That was super fun for Bean. I personally love, love, love the almond taste and it did not overpower the sugar icing too much either. Then we quickly tossed on the sprinkles before the icing dried and Voila! All done!
Since I always anticipate a hiccup when I’m cooking or baking, I decided to use crafty packaging in order to make the cookies SEEM more delicious. I bought the cellophane bags from Hobby Lobby (my new favorite place) and tied them with ribbon. Each kid would get one star cookie and then we bundled extra cookies together for the teachers. Then put everything in a fancy basket and there is no way they could be bad.
The cookies actually DID taste good, despite a nightmare I had which involved all the kids throwing their cookies back at Daniel and demanding a cupcake instead. That didn’t happen at all. In fact, Daniel said some of the kids asked for seconds! Awesome! Always leave them wanting more. I now have 8 weeks to figure out my next sugary creation.
