I'm a pretty modest gal. (I love you, Brittney.) But this afternoon I had such a stroke of genius, it made me giddy. And I have to share it!
I was making cookies with Sweetpea, who is 6 years old. "Six and a quarter," if you ask her. I really put her to work. I had her read the recipe, gather the ingredients, and tell me what quantities to measure out. She did great! When it came time to scoop the cookie dough onto the baking sheet, I had planned to take over because the dough was a little gloppy. But she wanted to do it.
I started to explain to her that the dough drops need to be evenly spaced, because they spread out during baking. I started to show her, by pointing with my finger, how many cookies we could fit on each cookie sheet. But that was confusing, and I knew it right away.
So I grabbed the bag of dried cranberries, and placed one where each cookie dough drop should go.
(This would also work with chocolate chips, nuts, or whatever little niblet you're adding to your cookies.)
It worked like magic! She was able to scoop the dough out and properly place each one. She said, "Wow, this was a really good idea, Mom. You should put this on your blog."
Way ahead of you, kid.
Now, maybe this is nothing new to you. Maybe you've been doing this for years with your kids. But I'd never heard of it before, and I was feeling like quite the culinary mom genius.
The cookies we made were Breakfast Cookies from Cooking With My Kid. There are actually two recipes, and I combined them, because I had both bananas and applesauce to use, as well as dried cranberries. (I only used 1/2 a stick of butter, in case you're wondering.)
They're fun little cookies. They have the texture of muffins, which was a little weird at first. But now I like it. It's fun to have a muffin in a cookie shape. (Oh, and they're not crumby at all. Very moist.)
They're very tasty, too, especially for healthy cookies. I didn't even notice the whole wheat flour. (And I used regular whole wheat flour, not WW pastry flour, as in the recipe.)
I, uh, ate four of them before the second cookie sheet was done baking. Ahem.
I added coarsely chopped walnuts to the third (and last) dozen, because I thought it sounded good. And it was.
Sweetpea liked them, too.
Found out the Little Mister doesn't like dried cranberries in his cookies/muffins. He'll eat them plain, but not in something. So weird.
