Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Baking with Mommy

An impulse purchase of Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar at Target last week has brought cookies to the fore in the life of the Steingruebl household. Who knew that one child could read one book nonstop for a week? With all of this talk of cookies, it was time to have The Talk with our little girl. That’s right-the Where Cookies Come From Talk.

With ingredients set out on the counter, we pulled up a chair and Elise climbed up. She poured the granulated sugar on top of the chopped-up, room temperature butter. Then, Elise scooped the required amount of brown sugar and added it to the bowl. Immediately after that, she grabbed a handful of brown sugar to see how it tasted. Her impression seemed favorable. Mommy added the vanilla, and then we set that bowl aside.

Now the fun part! We cooped! (scooped) the flour and measured the baking soda. Then, the stirring commenced. Mommy creamed the butter and sugar (it’s harder by hand than with a mixer!) wile Elise stirred the dry “ingeedients” in her bowl. With wild abandon, we mixed all of the ingeedients together in one big bowl and stirred them together. For about a hundred years. (It’s amazing how help can make things take longer...)

But wait! There’s more! What about the chocolate chips?! Elise had the big job of dumping them in with the dough. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to eat chocolate chips while pouring them into a bowl, so Mommy had to take over the chip adding duties. Elise was a little miffed that she only got 3 chips out of the deal. It’s okay, though-we used fake eggs so we got to sample the dough. Elise thought we’d done a pretty good job.

When the cookies were finally baked and cooled, I brought Elise a plate with a bunch of strawberries and one cookie for a treat. She ate all of the berries and eyed the fruits of her labor suspiciously until I encouraged her to take a bite.

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