Sunday Cookies

As part of my goal to be more intentional with my time and as a mom, I decided that we should make chocolate chip cookies together as a family. I had read somewhere that a good way to help with toddler development is to let them help in the kitchen. And I am running out of ways to keep her and me from being bored while we are stuck in the house and I thought baking cookies could be a fun way to break up the monotony.

We don't have any kitchen chairs currently, so I just put all the baking supplies right on the floor and we used the floor as our counter top. :)

Rose helped me dump the regular sugar, brown sugar, butter, and vanilla into one mixing bowl. She also snuck a clump of brown sugar very quickly. She didn't even ask if she could eat it. She just plopped it right into her mouth as fast as a toddler can (which is VERY fast when it comes to sticking food or non foods into her mouth). We delegated the mixing to Ryan.

While he mixed we measured out and combined the flour, baking soda, and salt.

My favorite part about making cookies is eating the sugar and butter mixture, but I found out that Ryan is a little bit of a control freak when it comes to baking. (I had no idea because we've never ever baked together before! In all three years that we've been married!) He let Rose have the tiniest speck of sugar and butter and only let me have a teeny tiny amount too! We had a bit of contention for the next ten minutes while I kept trying to get more (I'm pregnant! I deserve all the sugar and butter I want!) and he kept demanding I bring him the eggs (I wanted to eat it before the eggs were added obviously because you're supposed to be a little more cautious with what you eat when you are pregnant. No raw egg. Sigh.) and saying things like "Baking is chemistry! If you eat too much of this then the cookies won't turn out right!" (I have eaten MUCH more of the sugar/butter mixture while making cookies in the past and they have always turned out just fine.) Eventually, he put the bowl on the highest shelf in our house (no kitchen chairs means I can't reach anything higher than 6 feet. Sigh.) Grabbed the eggs himself, and put them in the bowl and moved the bowl around until every inch was covered in raw egg. He's a monster!

By this point, Rose had lost interest in helping with the cookie dough and was more interested in trying out all the different baking ingredients. I managed to get the flour, vanilla, and baking soda away quick enough. But while Ryan and I were calmly (haha) discussing the matter, she found the open bag of brown sugar and stuck a cherry sized clump of brown sugar right into her mouth before I could get to her.

She then helped us slowly add the flour mixture to the egg contaminated mixture and only missed the bowl a few times. (I was pretty proud that we managed to keep the amount of flour on the floor and us to a minimum. Only about 2 tablespoons, unlike the cloud of flour that I was imagining when I decided to brave this endeavor.)

Her favorite part was probably "helping" me measure out the chocolate chips and putting them into the cookie dough. She was kind enough to taste about 10 chocolate chips (maybe... probably more) to make sure they were safe to use in our cookies.

We then scooped the dough out onto a cookie sheet, placed them in the oven, and then promptly forgot about them and burned the first 12 cookies.

Things we learned:

1) Ryan and Kinsey can't bake together.
2) Maintain constant supervision on toddlers who are very interested in sugar and chocolate. And put away the harmful substances like flour, vanilla, and baking soda away right after using them.
3) Timers are a good thing.
4) Rose doesn't have very good aim when it comes to dumping things into a bowl, and we may need to continue practicing that.
5) Baking cookies together was still a fun family activity and we should do it again.
6) Oh, and all this actually happened a week ago and I ate some cookie dough and the baby is still kicking and I didn't get salmonella poisoning. So, I'm just going to add that to my tally: 
       - "times I've gotten salmonella eating raw cookie dough" = 0 
       - "times I've eaten raw cookie dough" = 65810473534874937138403

Also, in case you are wanting to make cookies yourself, I think the Nestle Toll House Chocolate Cookie Recipe makes some of the best chocolate chip cookies so here is the link to that if you want to try it out. (chocolate chip cookie recipe) By the way, I don't make any money off of my blog, I just do this because I want to preserve memories for my family, so this is not a sponsored post, I honestly just think this recipe is the best. (Except for my mission mom's chocolate chip cookie recipe which is actually the best, but I haven't figured out how to make them turn out right here in Utah, so when I figure that out, maybe I'll share.)