Making things harder for myself

I have been known on occasion to be overly ambitious about making things - typically food things, which are typically for parties - most typically birthday parties.  I was really proud of myself for not doing that this year for Travis's birthday party - bought the sandwiches and other food, and only made the cake - as opposed to last year when I made everything - cake, BBQ sliders, fudge, mac-n-cheese bites, chocolate dipped pretzels, etc., and I think spent like 3 days on it...  anyway - this isn't actually about birthday party food this time.

This time, I signed up to bring cookies for the boys class Easter parties at school.  Figured we would make and decorate cute cookies, and it would be all good.  But then, on Monday, I found these little gems at HEB...

If you can't tell, they are 3D cookie cutters - which make what look like adorable cookies from the pictures which were on the packaging (these are photos of the photos on the packaging)

Cute huh?  I should have known since they looked so pretty that it would be HIGHLY time consuming, but I didn't really thing of that, and I was ridiculous enough to actually purchase them... so yesterday, we made cookies.  It said the recipe made approx. 2 doz., so we made 1 1/2 x the recipe so that we would be certain to have 2 doz. for school since I needed 1 dozen per class.  We ended up with 41 cookies total - so I would say that worked out pretty well.  Leftovers will be for Easter Dinner Dessert - so watch out family coming to Easter dinner on Sunday!

They stack pretty well, and at this point look exactly like the ones in the photo ad!! (I swear 41, the back 3 are stacked 7 high, and the front 4 stacked 5 high - see I can count)

They did start to get stuck in the cookie cutters though, and if you look really closely at the upside-down flower pot cookie, you can see my fingernail impressions from where I had to push the cookie out of the cutter - oh well though.  

Now, I only purchased 3 colors of decorator icing, figuring one for me, one for Jake, one for Travis - ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  Once I started on the cookies I decided that if I gave over colors to the boys, it would just be a disaster and one of them, if not both of them would start drinking from the icing containers like they were juice boxes (yeah, seriously they would have).  Or, and also likely to have happened in addition to scenario #1 - they would have had an icing war-paint party, and be permanently stained in bright colors...  So instead, I decorated all the cookies during nap time.

Then, after the kiddos went to bed, I assembled them into the 3D designs that the photos on the packaging showed.  Only, they didn't really want to stand up all that well on their own initially, so I had to use icing to "glue" them together, and had to use spice containers from the pantry to prop them up on all sides while they dried.  They did end up cute though.

Now, if I had green and blue in addition to the colors I did obtain (and if the icing would have mixed a bit more evenly before I started applying it initially), I think I could have made them even cuter, but they ended up pretty cool, and the boys teachers were highly impressed.

Now, for the admitting that I made this way harder than it needed to be - making dough, rolling it out, pressing and baking the cookies took approx. 2 hours all in.  Icing the cookies took about 1 1/2 hours.  Assembling the cookies took about 1 hour.  So, this was a 4 1/2 hour project - which was spread throughout the day, which I spent more $ on than I would have if I had just bought pre-made cookies from the store, or made (probably tastier) from scratch NORMAL cookies.  Oye-vey - I guess I really will never learn... or maybe I will, but more likely I won't.

Bunnies & Bluebonnets

It feels like I am crazy busy, but then it also kind of feels like I have been doing nothing recently.  I guess maybe I am just crazy busy with the everyday boring aspects of life that aren't super tons of fun to blog about - ie: gym, grocery store, cooking, cleaning (or at least thinking about cleaning), keeping children alive, etc.

What is fun though are 2 things currently.  I was making breakfast (Sunday I think), and look out into the backyard to see this:

Bunnies!!!!!

And of course they immediately went to our neighbor's backyard when I ran to the closet to pull out the long range lens for the camera, but still - BUNNIES!!!!  And in my yard - which goes to prove that we have moved into a different area than we were in previously, because this is our first official sighting of bunnies.  And the kids were stoked.  Pretty sure they wanted to go adopt the bunnies immediately and spend the rest of the day petting them, but I made the boys stay inside (I know, mean mom - but on the other hand, wild bunnies, so good mom).

The other fun going on is that it is bluebonnet season, and as good Texans, we had to do the obligatory plopping of small children in the flowers and forcing them against their will to have photographs taken of them.  All told, I would say they did pretty well - certainly not a picture among them which is super high quality (not like my awesome Valentine pictures at least), but they are still cute boys, and are in bluebonnets.

Direction - look at Mommy and Smile = Result - one following directions, one trying to pick a flower...

Direction - this time look at Mommy, and also smile = Result - one sticking out the tongue, one smiling but rolling his eyes (seriously, he is too young to be as good at eye rolling as he is)...

Direction - hug your brother and smile = Result - about as close as we are going to come to following directions today

Direction - Travis, smile for Mommy = Result - Strike a pose!

Direction - Jake, smile for Mommy = Result - I'm going to do what Travis is doing!

So yep, those are my little hams, and our attempt at taking bluebonnet pictures.  We'll have another shot this weekend when we head to The River for a work weekend - we'll see if we get anything more "Wall Worthy".