Through the years, we've established lots of holiday traditions. Surprisingly, one of my favorite traditions we've created is making fun cookies, candies, and treats for Christmas. I say "surprisingly" because I don't love to bake or cook. However, doing it all together as a family with the kids being kind of crazy and making big messes is something I love!
I tried to implement one day where we do all of the baking and treat making, but so far that hasn't worked out for us. It's just too much and takes too long with littles to do everything in one day. This year, we kicked off our baking with making almond bark pretzels and puppy chow on a Saturday morning.
My crew is ready for some treat making!
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The kids want to help with every. single. step. I use it as an opportunity to teach them a thing or two about cooking!
Brecklyn and Brianna measuring peanut butter for puppy chow
Brianna is getting more and more independent in the kitchen. It's wonderful and a little heartbreaking :-).
Brecklyn and Brianna
Brianna and Brooke
Brecklyn and Brooke shaking the powdered sugar on the puppy chow
After we made one batch of puppy chow, it was time for the almond bark pretzels. These are super easy to make, but one of my favorite holiday treats!
Brecklyn
Daddy and Brooke
Brooke, Brianna, and Daddy
Brianna and Daddy
Bren and Daddy
We make quite a bit of puppy chow and almond bark pretzels because we give away about 6-8 tubs of it to our Bible class teachers, children's librarian, guitar teacher, piano teacher, etc. Our plan was to also do sugar cookies this same day, but for various reasons it didn't happen. Instead, we made sugar cookies the following Friday evening.
This is one of the kids' favorite activities!
Bren helping Daddy mix
Brooke helping Momma mix
Brecklyn helping Momma mix
Love my helpers!
Brooke and Daddy rolling out dough
Bren rolling out dough
Brianna cutting her cookies
Daddy helping Bren roll out dough
Momma helping Brecklyn with her dough
Momma giving Brianna some guidance
The kids were definitely messy after rolling out the dough and cutting their cookies, but it actually wasn't the EPIC mess it's been in years past. This process becomes more enjoyable for me each year!
Brecklyn and Brooke were still more interested in eating the dough than actually cutting cookies :-).
It took me a few years to find a sugar cookie recipe that worked for me, but I've used this recipe for about four years now. It the best recipe I've found because it doesn't require chilling, the cookies retain their shape beautifully, and it tastes great! Each year, our cookies improve a little more, and this year they were perfect!
The next day (Saturday), we had planned to go a birthday party for our friends who are boy-girl twins. However, one of them came down with strep throat the day before the party and it was canceled :-(. We decided to spend that time frosting our cookies instead! I make homemade frosting for our sugar cookies (because it's the BEST!), and as I was mixing it my mixer burned up! I received this mixer as a wedding gift over 17 years ago, so I was super sad when it died :-(. And, I had to finish making the frosting by hand.
I got the job done, though, and we were able to frost our cookies. I love how they all turned out!
Another special treat we attempted this year was cinnamon candy. My mom makes this and it's always delicious! We've never made it by ourselves, so we thought this was a good year to attempt it (we're such grown ups now, lol). It turned out okay, but for some reason it wasn't as cinnamon-y as we like it. I'm not sure if it was the oil we used or what. Since it was okay, we did break it up and give little tubs of it to some of Chris's coworkers. Hopefully, they enjoyed it! Next year, we'll work on perfecting this endeavor!
As the children get older, I hope to add more treats and recipes to our repertoire since baking together is something we all enjoy during this time of year. As an added bonus, all this treat making makes the house smell AMAZING!
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