See, I was making the cookie batter from scratch, and the icing from scratch, and icing them very carefully so they'd be both delicious and pretty. But little children are not careful about this kind of thing, which means that they make a total mess out of cookies that you have put a lot of effort into making and for those of us with maybe a bit of a perfectionist streak, that can be frustrating. Very. Which is why I only made cookies with them once or twice a year, and only when I was feeling super extra patient. (Patience is not my strong suit.)
But I realized something last week -- it turns out, little kids actually don't seem to notice the difference between fabulous cookies made from scratch and the kind you buy in a tube at the grocery store and just slice up. I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me before.
Last week, I bought the orange-and-black chocolate chip cookies that come in little pre-cut squares and made cookies with the kids, lickety-split, and it was so easy and they were so happy. And this week, I bought sugar cookies in a pre-made roll, and orange icing in a squeeze bottle and orange sugar crystals, and look -- super-easy cookies that the kids can decorate without really frustrating me.
And the funny thing is, I don't really like cookies much anyway (they fall very low on my list of preferred desserts), so even though these cookies don't taste quite as good as the from-scratch recipe, I don't really care. I'll save that recipe for when I'm serving cookies to guests; the rest of the time, the kids will be much happier if we just make cookies more frequently, even if they are slightly less fancy.
I'm guessing all of you knew this already (breaking news: convenience foods are convenient!), but the cookie thing was such a revelation to me, I thought I should make a note of it.
