Cookie Baking

Each year my Aunt Rose gets together with my cousins and bakes cookies. She's done this for years, but I'm in TN, they're in St. Louis so it's not really a viable option for me to join them. I've done cookie swaps before, but always thought this sounded fun-- the joy of baking and having someone to do the baking with! So this year I finally made it a point to try and schedule this with my sister, sister-in-law and nieces/nephews.

They both loved the idea as well! It took some planning, but found a day that worked for all of us and everyone came over today. My aunt recommended we pre-make the dough, then bake everything when we get together. So we decided to each make 3 different kinds of cookie doughs, then we'd bake at my house and everyone would get to take home some of each kind!

I also wanted to make some cut out sugar cookies and royal icing for the kids to decorate cookies while we were busy baking. After going to the cookie decorating day last week, however, I decided to glean from my friend, Jessi's, wisdom of buying sugar cookies, icing and decorations. Much simpler than my original idea and the kids had just as much fun. :) Then they ran along to play!

I loved Olivia's creativity of putting making a snowman with the cookies. So cute!! I helped the kids and took pics while Tracy was mixing and in between batches of cookies in the oven. Tracy brought m&m's, red velvet & Grinch, Becca brought butterfinger & maple (which were my personal fav) and I made chocolate chip, chocolate peanut butter chip & oatmeal raisin. We each got to keep probably a dozen or so of each. This was really fun and we already talked about next year, so hopefully this will be a new tradition!!