Baking with the French Fam!

As I mentioned in my previous post I have really been in the baking mood.  Great for family activities, but not so great on the hips, stomach, legs...lol!  In the past week we have made two different types of cookies: one great and one not so great!

I wanted to make an easy sugar cookie with Jase.  Something he could help with and not lose his attention span with 40 steps.  I found a 6 ingredient basic cookie dough mix in Cookie Monster's Yummy Cookies cookbook.  I bought some mini M&M's per Jase's request.  I set the table and we were ready to go.

We have everything we need...let's start mixing!

Jase was helping me feed Ally a cheese stick to keep her preoccupied!



We followed the instructions and packed it all up to chill in the fridge



Not sure what was going on with the rooster hair that day!



Mom it's good...I like it!

Long story short I got the dough out of the fridge, attempted to pat it down (with out a roller) and cut it with the cookie cutters...no luck. The dough was so sticky and did I mention that it tasted like I had just got it out of a play dough container?!?!  Awful!!  I triple checked my recipe to make sure I did not miss something, but everything was correct.  I had no idea how Jase was eating the dough and smiling.  So, I plopped some dough down on the cookie sheet and baked them.  Yep, still disgusting!!  Shawn had one when he got home and thought so as well.  Oh well, we had a good time making them.
At our Sunday School Christmas party this past Friday I tasted a cookie there that was delicious.  It is not your ordinary sugar cookie...way better!  Heather passed along the recipe to me and I was super excited, especially since the flop experience I had had just days before.

After decorating Jase's tree last night, we came downstairs and started on our new cookie recipe.  At this point in time it was 8 pm.  No worries, we'll be finished by 10 pm easy.  And while I'm at it, I'll go ahead and double the recipe.  There were three different parts to this recipe: making the dough, glaze, and icing.  The dough was no big deal and it went straight into the freezer for a quick freeze.  And it tasted good too...always a good sign.

Next, we moved onto the glaze.  You take one egg yolk, one teaspoon of water and mix it up real well.  Then you add some food coloring.  We ended up making red, blue, green, yellow, and brown.  After the quick freeze was fulfilled we pulled them out rolled out the dough (with my new roller!).  We made snowmen, bells, candy canes, gingerbread men, stars, and angels.  After you cut out the figures, you paint on the yolk glaze.  We stayed very basic with one color per cookie.

Then you baked them for 6 minutes and moved them to the cooling rack where I attempted to pipe the powdered sugar icing on.  I did not have the right set up for this and I was making a mess!!  I had my last batch in oven and I was decorating some cookies, so I asked Shawn to check on the ones in the oven.  He opened the oven door and said "you did not put any glaze on these!" "WHAT" I said!  LOL! At this time it was pushing midnight and I started feeling delirious...fighting to stay awake!  I remember telling myself to push through and finish the stinking cookies!! At this point I was rethinking double batch idea!  I had to improvise so we got the sprinkles out and those were some of the best ones!

The 4+ hour cookie fiasco was over and after looking and tasting them I was happy with the end result.  I enjoyed it, but why in the world did I start at 8 pm?!? 

We're down to two plates...one will be going with Shawn to work tomorrow...get them out of here! LOL

Here is the website if you're interested in trying these!  I did not use the orange/lemon zest in the dough nor the egg whites in the icing.  They taste great and were a lot of fun...time management could have been a little better, but what else is new? :)

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/12/my_favorite_christmas_cookies_from_childhood_and_beyond/