Baking cookies

It's not misleading to say we baked cookies if we used store-bought dough, right? Because, technically, we did still bake the cookies.

And in this instance, we even added a little flour to the cookie dough, so there was some mixing involved.

Granted, we did it all by hand - no mixer needed - but it was enough to give Sydney's 4.5-year-old attention span a taste of what a cookie-baking experience is like.

And she loved it! And she did it herself. (Except when she needed Mommy's help.)

The motivation for all of this was an angel-shaped, metal cookie cutter that we'd picked up a week earlier while Christmas shopping. Sydney had been putting in daily requests to finally get a chance to use it. So I picked up some sugar cookie dough and put her to work.

We used half the dough for angel cookies. The other half, we rolled into balls, which we then rolled in sugar. (After they baked, we topped them with Hershey Kisses.)

Oddly enough, now that they're done, Sydney's only eaten one or two of them. Mommy, Alex and Grandma Lynne certainly are appreciating them. (Daddy has stronger will-power.)

Maybe next year we'll set aside an afternoon for some real, start-to-finish, baking. If only we could find something to make that's not so fattening.