My niece and nephew have seemed to taken an interest in baking, and as such, I've been thinking about more ways to engage them in the baking process. My latest effort was more elaborate than anything we have done before in that it involved not only rolling out and cutting the dough into shapes, but then also decorating the cookies with icing and sprinkles.
The base recipe I used was Cook's Illustrated Foolproof Holiday Cookie approach. The dough was fairly simple to construct, though it added a "surprise" ingredient of cream cheese. I decided to make and chill the dough at home before engaging the kids to roll and cut out the cookies.
Ok, easy to far. The tricky part definitely involved including the kids, who didn't want to wait the full 10 minutes (and probably needed more like 20) to chill the rolled dough sections before cutting.
As such, the dough was relatively warm and harder to handle, especially while cutting out the last few cookies from each rolled dough section. The cookies also then required 1 – 2 minutes less time in the oven, probably because of how warm the dough was.
The icing was a bit messy, and I probably should have made it a bit thicker to make it easier to get on the cookies and then firm up. That being said, I think this was the kids' favorite part of the activity, particularly picking out which food dye colors they wanted to use.
The cookies were a big hit at the larger family event we took them to, particularly among the kids who seemed to love the softer cookies with very sugary icing. My husband and I were not as big a fan of the result. We think maybe the cream cheese made the cookies too soft, and the icing was probably too sweet for our adult tastebuds, so I'll probably look for another recipe to try in the future.
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