That's done

Our marathon of cookie making has ended with only two sets of clothing and one chair being the only sacrifices.

LB manned two pastry bags yesterday to decorate her sugar cookies. I decided that ordinary liquid food coloring was not sufficient for coloring icing. So I bought the jell type. Boy that stuff is strong.

We set about making the sugar cookies yesterday morning. I mixed the batch and located the various cookie cutters. The problem was that LB is a little slow in choosing the cutters. The dough was very buttery rich. Add slow choosing and butter rich and you get dough that is not as easily handled as it could be. She also wanted to put the cookie cutter in the very middle of the dough. I tried to explain how to place the cutters to utilize the one rolling as much as possible. That was a concept that seemed to elude her. The dough made several trips to the freezer between rollings.

We got the cookies into the oven. The first ones almost burned to a crisp. The recipe called for a 400 degree oven for ten minutes. Whoa - too high and too long. We got the temperature lowered and all the cookies baked off.

By that time it was lunch time. I took her to our favorite Tex-Mex fast food place. I was lingering over the last of the nachos, when she announced that she was finished and ready to decorate the cookies.

I stalled as long as possible, then began tinting the frosting. Taking a tip from Sandra Lee and Semi-homemade, I had bought prepared frosting. I put some into two mixing bowls and tinted one a deep green and the other a fairly deep red. I left some uncolored explaining that this could be the "base frosting" on the cookies. That idea was quickly discarded.

I loaded two pastry bags with the tinted frostings. I showed her how to twist the bags and where to push. She immediately grabbed one in the middle and squeezed. We went over how to do it again, and she was really good. I, foolishly, left her to her own devices. This was her thing.

After a bit, she told me she was out of red icing. I came in and the pastry bags were extruding icing from the filling end. I was clearly reminded that her 8th birthday is next month! This was clearly something that required more supervision.

It all ended fairly well. I realized that I had red icing on my shirt. When I was going to clean up the bags, there was so much icing left in them that my hands were surprisingly red. Clearly the red coloring is much stronger. She had red and green on her shirt, and some red on her jeans.

All in all, the cookies are cute, and she is proud. She made three rocking horse cookies for Doodle Bug since DB is getting a rocking horse for Christmas. When I told her mother she was thinking of DB, her mother was touched. She asked if LB remembered Monkey Boy with dedicated cookies, I said no. When I told LB that, she said he could have the bells because he is a "ding-dong."

She was with me for 24 hours, and she wanted to stay longer. I felt she really needed to go home, so she went. It was fun though. I am so blessed to have such a wonderful granddaughter.

Peace.