Bolling With 5: Baking Christmas Cookies (#Tradition) ~ 2016

Our elves gave us a gentle reminder that we hadn't yet baked Cookies for Santa. They left us a few new cookie cutters, embellishments, color-me-elf-aprons, and cookie dough to get us in the mood.

We took the hint loud and clear and got to work on December 23rd. LOL! Talk about last minute....

It's definitely a fun tradition of ours and I hope it continues forever, even when we are old and our children are adults.

I took the advice of one of my favorite and most talented bakers in UTAH, Gen, and put our pre-made cookie dough in the freezer. Keeping the dough really cold was supposed to be helpful with it being overly sticky. It was also supposed to help, in the baking process, with keeping it's form.

We got to work rolling out the dough. As you can see, Darren is always trying to make us laugh.

This snowflake was the first cookie cut and I was so excited to see how beautiful they were looking.

I don't know if you can tell, but another piece of advice I took from Gen was to work on parchment paper. Basically, if you cut all of your cookies on top of parchment paper, you do NOT have to try and pick up the cookies off of a counter, with a spatula, causing the possibilities of tearing or breaking (due to room temp dough).

It's so funny because we had some laughter and small talk, but we are ALL such perfectionists that we were a LOT silent because we were so concentrated. LOL! I am thankful that we have ALEXA to sing to us.

Caught licking his fingers... I guess Santa doesn't mind germs. Hehe

Our cookies were done being shaped. I was definitely enthusiastic and hopeful this year about putting them in the oven and having them returned to me just liked they looked BEFORE they went into the oven.

We cut santas, angels, christmas stockings, snowmen, Jesus' cross, gingerbread, christmas trees and more..

SADLY, they didn't come out perfect like when they went in. Typically, I pull them out immediately, take the SAME cookie cutter and cut the WARM cookie dough. These are all of the left over scraps from the expanded cookie cut AGAIN! I am BOUND and determined to figure out how to resolve this. I have a woman at church who makes these all year round. I am going to have a session with her. LOL!

As you can see... the clothing changed. It's usually the next day that we decorate. I didn't take MANY pictures of the kids decorating because I was working on our Happy Birthday Jesus Cake. They started ALL of this on their own.