Making cookies with my kid

The Bug loves to help me cook.  She has gotten to be good at washing veggies, peeling certain things, putting chopped veggies or fruit into the salad bowl, stirring eggs... enough skills to where she actually helps me out.

Not so much with Christmas cookies, though.  At least, not yet.  Her "help" definitely increases the time involved in an already time-consuming process.  Every year I make a few different varieties of cookie, all of which are from my Swedish and German great grand-mothers' recipes.  It's a ton of work, and I don't even have a sweet tooth, but I love them and I love making them and it's just a part of Christmas to me.

I've learned not to attempt them all in one night. And to increase my odds of not strangling the Bug, I often make the dough for one kind after she goes to bed so we can bake them together the following evening.  On Saturday we made the Pepparkarkar dough together (which was awesome), and we baked one batch before she went to bed.  She LOVED it.  But I... well, I think that if I sucked less at rolling out dough I would also care less when she stuck the cookie cutter in the dead center, tried to scrape that cut-out with her fingers, and essentially made me roll the entire thing out after only one or two cookies had been deemed more or less shapely enough to bake.  Did I mention I suck at rolling?

She does, however, wield the red and green sugar sprinkles with impressive dexterity and enthusiasm... WOAH, baby!

We did the Swedish ice box cookies on Sunday night (I make a half-batch which yields about three thousand cookies), and I made the German sugar cookie dough last night so we'll bake them tonight.  (These are particularly fun to make with kids because each cookie has to be pressed with the sugar-coated bottom of a glass.)  We'll do the svenska mandel kransar tomorrow night, and call our project finis at that time!