Spending A Weekend With The "Grand"...Oh, How GRAND!

This past weekend, Robby had a golf tournament in Baton Rouge and Justin and Sarah wanted to go to Shreveport for his birthday dinner SO...Parker Ann spent Saturday and Saturday night with me! And boy did we ever have FUN doing a little baking and finger painting.

Since Halloween would soon be here, I decided that we should bake some Halloween cookies...

The idea came to me when I was in New Orleans a couple weeks ago and found a cat cookie cutter on the clearance table at Bed, Bath and Beyond. It even had the recipe for the cookie dough and icing on the tag.

I wanted to find some more Halloween cookie cutters so I headed down to our Bed, Bath and Beyond and found this set of 100 cookie cutters for all occasions!

Now, we had a witch, small cat, ghost, a bat and two pumpkins to go along with the big cat I already had.

I made the cookie dough that morning since it had to sit in the refrigerator for 3- 4 hours before we cut the cookies...

                                     Here's the recipe for the dough in case you want to try it:
Cream Together: 1 cup butter
                             2/3 cup sugar
Beat In:                1 egg
Add:                     1 tsp. vanilla
                             1/2 tsp. salt
                             2 1/2 cup sifted flour
Mix until all ingredients are well blended. Chill dough 3-4 hours before rolling.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Roll out 1/4" thick and cut.
Bake about 8-10 minutes or until barely colored.
Remove from cookie sheets and cool on wire racks.

Then it was time to roll the cookie dough out...

Cut some cookies...

And pop them into the oven to bake.

While the cookies were baking, we made the icing:
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1 Tb. butter
1 Tb. milk
1 Tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp. lemon juice
Melt butter and combine all ingredients, beat until smooth.
Add food coloring if desired.
Yield 1/3 cup
*Note: I tripled the icing recipe.*

I mixed the dry ingredients together.

And creamed the butter and sugar together.

And then added all of the other ingredients.

And, of course, Parker helped!

And she also did a fair amount of tasting...Like any good cook does!

YUMMY!

While the cookies cooled, I mixed the food coloring in for icing the cookies...

And then the REAL fun began...Decorating the cookies!

And the VERY BEST part of all...Getting to eat one of those cookies!

DELICIOUS!

Next, we did some FINGER PAINTING! One of the books I bought Parker for her birthday was one I remember from my children's literature class in college (I know...always the teacher; everything is a "teachable moment"), "Mouse Paint". This is a great book for teaching children about mixing colors to create other colors. So, after I read her the book again, we did just what the little mice in the book did...We mixed some paints together...With our hands!