Cookies

I have a confession to make. I think about blogging way more than I actually blog these days. I apologize for that. I realized today that I have this list on my phone of things I want to share with you, and I just haven't sat down to type it out for ya. "Come on Meg, get on top of these things"

Well, today's tidbit is a few days old at this point, but still worth a tell. On Thursday this week, we invited a few friends over to make cutout sugar cookies for our Christmas party. Our friends had never cut out cookies before. (Gasp!!) I know--shocking--but, hey that's China. We made the dough ahead of time, and then used a de-labeled beer bottle to roll it out. (it was the size of a wine bottle, so it worked well) Then, as soon as I got it thin enough for cookies, I would say "Alright, cut away" and these four Chinese girls went to town! They cut out trees and stars, bells and ornaments, hearts and gingerbread men. And of course, to make the scene perfect Laura jumped in to make sure each of us has a dash, or a smear of flour on our faces.

We weren't sure how they would turn out because the dough was a little crumbly-ier than I thought it should be, and it's China. And we'd never made dough from scratch before. But they turned out fine. A little more like biscuits… they were sorta flaky, or rather layered. But that might have been from rolling it out…. it didn't like to roll. Super elastic. I would roll it out and it would shrink right back up. Took some real elbow grease to make it cooperate. (Ha, sorta like me as a kid… hahaha)

Well, jump forward a day to the party. Before our friends arrived I made the frosting… and the sprinkles. We found powdered sugar, so I mixed powdered sugar and water until we had frosting! Super simple, I threw in a splash of vanilla extract to improve the taste, but it didn't do much. Then I separated out a little to make green, yellow and red frosting too. As for the sprinkles. We looked around town and couldn't find any. So, Laura had the idea to use regular sugar and food coloring. I figured some sort of shaking device would work best… So I poured the sugar into a cup with a couple drops of food coloring. Placed a slightly smaller cup inside the bigger one, and shook it like a martini. Worked like a charm!!! After about 20 minutes and a lot of shaking, I had sprinkles in blue, red, yellow, green, orange, and purple!

The party was a great success. I wasn't around the cookies, but they were all gone so they must have been good. I was upstairs with the snowflake cutters. Teaching our Chinese friends to fold paper, and cut out shapes was a blast! They were all so afraid of making a mistake or didn't know what to cut. But, I told them it didn't matter, and showed a few examples and they were off and cutting. We taped our finished snowflakes up on the curtain and we had it full in no time. (Cutting snowflakes is my favorite thing to do.)

The meiguarens (may-gwa-rens = americans) had some street food after all our friends went home as per tradition and to congratulate ourselves on a successful party.

Until next time.

p.s. There was a fair amount of frosting, and a bunch of sprinkles/sugar left over… so we're having cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning. And they're gonna be rainbow because of the colored sprinkles. =)