Holiday Baking with Your Kids: Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

by The Baby Bunch on December 12, 2011

I love baking! Although I have to admit it took me a while to learn to enjoy baking with my kids. When you bake with the kids, it’s important to let them do as much as possible by themselves, even if it’s not up to your perfect standards! :)

Learning to let go, stop hovering, and let them bake was worthwhile – baking together is one of our favorite family activities, especially in winter, and especially during the holidays.

Here’s one great recipe to make – my kids practically make it all by themselves, with very little help from me. Recipe was adapted from the Williams Sonoma website, and makes 12 cookies.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Ingredients
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease baking sheet.

2. Put the confectioners’ sugar into a bowl and set aside.

3. In another bowl, using a wooden spoon, stir together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

4. In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Add the egg and beat until blended. Add the vanilla and beat until blended.

5. Add the flour mixture. Mix just until blended.

6. Using a tablespoon, scoop up a rounded spoonful of dough. Scrape the dough off the spoon into the palm of your other hand. Roll the dough into a ball. Roll the ball in the confectioners’ sugar until covered. Place the balls on a prepared baking sheet, 2 inches apart.

7. Bake the cookies until they are crackled and puffed, 10 to 12 minutes. Using oven mitts, remove the baking sheet from the oven and set it on a wire rack for 15 minutes.

8. Using a metal spatula, move the cookies onto the rack and let cool completely.

What are YOUR favorite holiday recipes to make?

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The Art of Being Grateful

by The Baby Bunch on November 3, 2011

pumpkin pieI find that being grateful is often harder than it sounds. It sounds easy enough – any of us that has been blessed with reasonably good health, a family, and enough financial security to provide us with basic needs for shelter, warmth, clothing and food, should feel extremely grateful.

This is always true, and in tough financial times it’s truer than ever. And yet, although definitely blessed by the standards above, I find myself, too often, more whiny than grateful. It’s so easy to complain, to look at the empty half, to want more.

How does one get to a place where one is truly, consistently, thankful? As a mother, this is especially important to me, because my own disposition, my attitude towards life, affects my children’s. I desperately want them to be aware of how blessed they are – to be grateful. But if I complain and whine, how can I possibly expect them not to?

So I’ve been working on it. I started paying more attention to my attitude. Whenever I feel down, whenever I let small daily stuff get to me, I try to remind myself to focus on the big picture – and be grateful for everything that is so good in my life.

I try to pay attention to small, daily pleasures and give thanks – a good meal, a warm jacket, getting into bed at night and feeling the crisp sheets and the warm blanket. I say a silent “thank you” whenever I can, and as a family, we have also gotten into the habit of discussing our blessings during dinner, or at the kids’ bedtime.

So, we don’t just discuss our day – we remember to point out the good things that happened to us that day,and give thanks.

It’s easy to complain. Life as a parent is stressful. But this month (and hopefully in the future too) I am relearning how to give thanks.

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Halloween Costumes: Can We Please Allow Them To Be Kids?

I took my kids to a Halloween costumes store the other day to pick costumes. I have to say this is so very different than how it used to be when I was a kid!

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“Expecting” on Facebook: Why Not?

I thought it was interesting that the recent news from Facebook got so many negative responses. Facebook now has an “expected child” option, which enables expectant moms (and dads?) to announce their exciting news.

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Parenting Posts I Loved This Month

I’m an avid reader of mommy blogs. I know there’s this struggle among “mommy bloggers” about whether it’s OK to call them that, whether it’s belittling, but I think mommy bloggers are amazing and should be proud of what they’re doing. Thanks to mommy bloggers, the silence surrounding motherhood has finally been broken. We live in an era where there’s so much pressure on us moms to be “perfect,” it’s almost sickening. Thank goodness we have women like Heather and Catherine and Liz that tell it like it is and make us all feel just a little better about ourselves.

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Mommy Guilt

I don’t think I’ve ever met a mom who didn’t feel guilty about her choices as a mom. I’m not sure why we have to do this to ourselves, but apparently we do – we all feel guilty.

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Finding Out Baby’s Sex

Let me start off this blog post by saying that YES! We found out our babies’ sex as soon as we possibly could. There was no way I was going to wait nine months to find out! I was way too impatient. I wanted to decide on a name, to decorate the nursery, to buy clothes… but truthfully, the main reason we found out the sex of our babies while still pregnant was pure curiosity.

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Being Pregnant: The Joys, The Sorrows

he other day, on our Facebook page, we asked our fans, “Being pregnant…loved it? Hated it?”

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Summer Baby Showers

Summer baby showers are so much fun. It’s not that I don’t like winter baby showers – I do! But there’s something inherently relaxed and casual about a summer baby shower.

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A Few Thoughts on Mother’s Day

We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday. It was a lovely Sunday, complete with a festive brunch, flowers, chocolates, a massage gift card (yay!) and lots of pampering and effort from my kids to let me off the hook for one day and do as much of the daily chores as they can handle.

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