Decorating Christmas Cookies & Back To Blogging

It's been a while since I have done a blog post. For the majority of quarantine I used my creativity in other areas and spent a lot of time online shopping but I wasn't feeling creative or motivated enough to write posts or style pictures for my blog. I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos during quarantine and I thought, "Well, I can easily film myself shopping at Target or cleaning my cabinets and put a fast speed on the film while editing." but YouTubing is actually harder than it looks. I want to give kudos to those YouTubers out there. It would be like having a second full-time job with filming, editing and uploading, along with the legal ways to protect your channel and the hoops to jump through just to put some music to your video. I also realized I was pretty shy on camera, so I decided to just go back to the blogging platform that I had built over the past nine years and focus on improving my site all around. I am looking forward to the new changes that will be on Barefoot in Blue Jeans blog, so be on the look out for a new and improved site! Until then, let's get into today's post. 

Last Saturday (12/19/2020), John and I spent the day decorating sugar cookies. It was a fun Christmas activity that I did with my mom when I was little and I wanted to re-live that tradition. I was also inspired by a pretty cookie post that I saw on Pinterest. I bought cookie cutters, sprinkles and some icing from JoAnn Stores. I used a very easy cut-out cookie recipe from a blog called In Katrina's Kitchen. I liked her recipe because there was no need to chill the dough. I pretty much wanted to roll the dough out as soon as I was done combining wet and dry ingredients and get the cookies baked quickly. I used basic primary color food coloring and cream cheese frosting from Pillsbury. A little trick though... I put some of the frosting into the microwave to soften it and make it more into an icing consistency. I also used almost a full bottle of red food coloring to get the red color that I pictured for the red frosting. 

We left the kitchen a mess for most of the day. Dishes needed to be put away from the dishwasher, the stove needed to be wiped down and the counters were cluttered with some groceries that we needed to put away along with the cookie decorating mess, but I didn't worry about it. I was just enjoying the time with John and I was trying to be creative with my cookie designs. 

I am not a huge fan of the "handled" rolling pins. In my past cookie or pie baking years, my experience with the handled rolling pins have been that the handles get rusty or stuck and the wooden barrel of the rolling pin leaves indentations in the dough. While looking on Amazon for a rolling pin, we kept seeing these "French" rolling pins without spinning handles. I remember when I was younger, my Great-Grandma Kirby had a rolling pin without handles and I always preferred to use that one over a rolling pin with handles. After some research and learning that the French rolling was the superior rolling pin, we bought this Farberware "French" Rolling Pin and it was a hassle-free dough rolling experience. 

I almost made two batches of the cookie dough and I am glad that I ended up just making one batch.  Once I started rolling the dough out and using the cookie cutters, I realized that the one batch makes a good amount of cookies. I had some dough left over that I never ended up using. The blog post on Katrina's Kitchen says that you can freeze the dough; in hindsight, I probably could have froze the left over dough even if I wasn't planning on decorating anymore cookies. We could have made round ones and ate them straight from the oven. 

I think we did pretty well with our cookie designs. We used the gingerbread cookie cutters and made sugar cookie versions of ourselves. We are clearly not talented in the decorating of gingerbread men/women but we gave it our best shot. It is pretty funny what we actually ended up with. 

Every year we seem to add a holiday activity to our traditions to-do list and this year, we added decorating Christmas cookies to that list. I am really happy with how they turned out, even if I had to use 150 drops of red food coloring, approximately. 

Merry Christmas!