Star Cookie Trees

Had my grand kids over for the weekend and we made these cute cookie trees!  These are the softest cookies ever!  You can find the recipe we used HERE (we tinted our dough a bright green). Since each tree takes 21 cookies, we tripled the batch.  I am sure this will be a new go to recipe in our home as they are super easy and just taste so good!  You don't want to roll them too thick either as they rise quite a bit!  The recipe called for a regular sugar cookie glaze, but we decided that cookies that soft and yummy needed a yummy cream cheese frosting to make them even more delectable...but we wanted our frosting to be a bit more Christmasy flavored, so we added 2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice and a tsp of orange flavoring.  I kid you not when I tell you that our frosting tastes just like the orange glaze that comes with the Orange Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls.  It's the kind of frosting that once it hits your mouth, you have that surreal moment when you just think you are in heaven! lol  The trees were made to be part of our Christmas dinner Centerpieces (of course they will be removed from the plates and placed among some greenery), We had a small amount of leftover dough, we made 40 miniature gingerbread men so the kids could sample their wares.  They were bite sized...and there were absolutely no gingerbread men left by the end of the day...they were THAT good!  TFL  and hope you are all having fun making memories with your little ones as well!

Homemade Oreos

My granddaughters spent the weekend with Grammy so we decided to make some homemade Oreos.  They turned out great and are so easy to make!  I used a small cookie scoop so that all the cookies would be uniform in size and found that the same cookie scoop made the perfect amount of filling for the middles!

Homemade Oreos Recipe

Cookies:
2 boxes Devils food cake mix
4eggs
2/3 cup oil

preheat oven to 325 degrees
mix all ingredients together until well mixed and smooth.
use cookie scoop to place cookies on ungreased cookie sheets.
bake for ten minutes (cookies will still be a bit soft, they will harden as they cool) let cool completely before adding filling. *makes 70 single cookies

Filling:
3 cups of powdered sugar
1/2 cup of butter
1/4 cup of crisco or lard
2 tsp Vanilla
Milk (just enough to make mixture smooth)

cream butter and crisco until well blended and smooth.  Add powdered sugar and vanilla, blend together, mixture may be crumbly looking, add milk by the tablespoon until the mixture just begins to come together.  You want it to be stiff enough to hold up in between the cookies.  Use same scoop that you made cookies with to add the filling between two cookies, gently press the cookies together just until he filling reaches the edges.  enjoy!  *makes 35 filled cookies.

hand sanitizers

This was my first attempt at doing hand sanitizers...guess it went ok because I barely had them done and got an order for 8 more...woohoo! :)