Christmas Cookies!

First off, let me apologize for the delay. Yes, this ought to have gone up yesterday, I know, but I didn't get home at all until late, and then I fell into bed almost as soon as I'd returned home. This morning I was distracted by life in general, but here at last is the record of adventures for yesterday, December the twenty-second.

Thursday, December 22, 2011


King's take:
We made cookies today.
We made cookies and we made cake.
We got all the ingredients first. Then we got the mixer to mix up the cookie dough. We mixed the cookie dough, it was brown. The cookie dough was gingerbread cookie dough. It needed to chill for one hour.
While the cookie dough was chilling, we baked a cake for Baby Jesus. Vanilla cake, in a Bundt pan.
We put the cake in the oven and then we made some chocolate chip cookies for Patch.
We mixed up the dough for chocolate chip cookies and then we added the chocolate chips. We added the whole bag! We stirred it up to mix in the chips. They didn't mix in very well. We had added too many chips! We said "oh well, extra chocolate".
We scooped dough onto a baking sheet. We put 12 on each sheet. Then we put them in the oven.
They cookied 8-10 minutes.
That was about the point I got tired of cooking.
I'm sorry I was tired of cooking.
I'm going to play Bakugan on the Wii for a break.

My take:
Today, the plan is to bake cookies for Christmas! Mom also asked if we could bake the birthday cake for Baby Jesus (a tradition in my family, since everyone else gets a birthday cake).
I had e-mailed Mom a recipie for gingerbread cookies, which I planned on making with King today, and she had all the ingredients (except butter and eggs) out on the island in the kitchen. We got started pretty much right away. I asked King to read off the directions and how much of each ingredient we needed as I did the measuring. Once I had a measured portion, I'd give him the spoon or cup and it would be his job to dump it into the bowl. Putting the cookies together didn't take all that much effort by itself, at least for the first few steps. Of course, we got everything measured out for the second step and then I realized I'd put things in the wrong bowl, as it needed to be mixed with an electric mixer, and Mom only has a stand mixer. (I am the opposite, I have only a hand mixer, and thus don't really have a clear idea how to use a stand mixer.) Well, I dumped everything into the correct bowl for the stand mixer and set it going, King reading directions to me from his seat at the island while I worked. I am not exactly sure why the stand mixer confused me, but it did.
We managed to get the cookies put together, though a lot of  the work was actually just me standing in front of the mixer while talking to King, or singing along with the Christmas music on the CD we'd put in. Once the dough was mixed up, it needed to chill. I asked Patch to come in and help with the cling wrap, because it's tricky and my hands were sticky with dough. Once the dough was in the fridge to chill for an hour (or so), we debated what to do while we waited.
Mom had asked that we also bake the cake, and had the cake mix and Bundt pan all set out and ready to go. Patch asked us to make chocolate chip cookies (apparently he doesn't care for gingerbread?). I told Patch we'd make his cookies if he found the recipie and got everything together for us, then we set to work getting the cake ready, since that had been a previous request, would take longer to cook, and stuff had already been set out for it.
Cake, of course, needed to be made in the stand mixer bowl, so I washed up the dishes from the first batch of cookie dough by hand. Then we set to work putting the cake together. Considering it was a box-mix, this part was simple, and the cake was in the oven in practically no time.
I asked Patch to wash the mixer bowl again, since we'd need it for the chocolate chip cookies as well, and King read through the recipie while Patch cleaned. Apparently, though, I wasn't quite paying attention to all of the bits of recipie information and quantities of items that we had.
We did this batch of cookies much the same way as the last--I'd measure things and King would pour them in, then I'd operate the stand mixer. Then it was time to add the chocolate chips! I sliced the bag open with scissors, then instructed King to dump it in, not paying attention to how big a bag I had, as opposed to how big a bag the recipie actually called for. Upon dumping the bag of chips into the mix, a couple chips got caught in the cut-off part of the top of the bag, and I told King to eat them to make sure the chcolate chips tasted good...only he didn't see where they were! He tried to eat the plastic for a moment, and I giggled and dumped the chips out of their hidng place to hand them to him. He took it all in stride and assured me that the chips were good.
Excellent. Now to mix them into the dough... and the bowl kept trying to get away from me! King held it steady while I stirred and stirred, wondering why on earth the chips weren't mixing in all that well. I shrugged it off, though, and set about getting things ready to bake the cookies, slightly distracted by the cake for a moment when it came out of the oven, looking very tasty.
With the cake set to cool and cookie sheets done up with parchment paper, I pulled out two spoons to start plopping cookies out on the pans. King counted for me, to make sure we had the same number of cookies on each pan--an even dozen. We laughed over the fact that the cookies weren't holding together all that well, and there were a LOT of chocolate chips. Once they went into the oven, we pulled the gingerbread dough out of the fridge.
I handed King the bag of cookie cutters while I made a mess with the flour preparing the island countertop to roll out cookie dough on. With the cookie dough rolled out flat, King would hand me a cookie cutter and I'd place it. Once I had several placed, King would push them all in. This worked well for a few rounds, and then King decided he was tired of cooking and wanted to go play Wii for a while. Not all that suprising, really, since we'd been at this for nearly 4 hours. So I washed my hands and got him set up with the game he wanted to play, asked him for his take on today's adventure, and then went back to the kitchen to finish up the cookies.
It wasn't untill all the cookies were finished baking and set out to cool that Patch really looked at the chocolate chip cookies and complained that they were more chip than cookie...this turned out to be my fault for not reading the package and the directions closely. We'd dumped a 12 ounce bag of chocolate chips into a recipe that called for 6 ounces of chips. No wonder they hadn't mixed in well! Nothing to be done about it, though, the cookies were already baked.