Create-A-Cookie

Do you feel that baking cookie cutouts with your child is too much work?

Better Homes and Gardens and Parents magazine have the solution: The virtual cookie .

Just follow the steps and your child will decorate their very own cookie without the fuss or mess. I still prefer the old fashioned way of spending time with your child and sharing in your yummy efforts. If you just don't have the time or energy, this may satisfy your little baker. At least until the taste test!

Enjoy!

Fun Cookie Facts

Happy New Year!

2010

Get motivated for some baking! January is the perfect month to nestle yourself in the kitchen, try out some new cookie recipes and have fun. Here are some cookie facts from faqfood.com to get you started:

1. Testing out cake batter and oven temperatures, ancient bakers created the cookie by placing a small amount of batter on a sheet and baking that first.
2. Chocolate chip cookies are the most popular kind of cookie in the United States (tip: good to keep this in mind when baking for others).
3. Cookies are best either fresh out of the oven (warm) or the day after they are baked. Waiting a day lets the flavors absorb with each other.
4. If you seal up freshly baked cookies, they will retain too much moisture and fall apart.

2010 Cookie Talk Blog Resolutions:

• Post more often
• Share new cookie recipes
• Increase participation and information exchange (please leave a comment with an inquiry, suggestion, or recipe exchange)
• Talk about baking experiences and old wives tales (that actually work).
• Review gadgets for baking (Have a gadget for me to review, send me an email?)

Cookies For a Cause

Press Dough bakes up over 200 cookies for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at

Brentapalooza 2009!

Using our own "Ultimate Cookie Cutout Recipe", over 200 B-shaped cookie cutouts will be handed out at a fundraising event for childhood cancer research. Wrapped up individually with our recipe card, these tasty treats are a great thank-you.

Shoppe For Tradition

73 More Days Until Christmas! New Look! New Features!

I want to help you create some great traditions this year! You will find an opportunity to pick and choose the traditions you hold most dear, all the while saving you time.

Join me each week as I feature products, many that help our special needs children (motor skills, visual/pretend play), post a countdown planning calendar, activity tips or suggestions, and holiday links to events. If you know of any major events (holiday extravaganza's) happening in your town, please leave me a comment and I will add it to our calendar.

For additional fun, great new Press Dough products are developing for the season.

Don't forget to sign up for our Press Dough Cookie Cutter weekly giveaway!

MQT: Do you have a plan/to-do list for the holiday season?

Cookie cutter that makes multiple cuts?

Have you heard of such a device? Neither have I until I had the task of cutting out Valentine's Day cookies for my son's class last year. After positioning my, one and only, heart cookie cutter every which way on the dough, I was wondering if there was a better way. I scoured the internet looking, but found nothing. With cheers from family and friends, I embarked on submitting this idea of a multiple cookie cutter to a contest. Though I didn't get the benefits of winning this contest, I pursued this "idea" that everyone thought was so great. Again, I went to the internet and researched to make sure that a product, like the one I pictured in my head, was not already out in the market. I still couldn't find anything.
I took a leap and began my own "product development" on this cookie cutter that could cut multiple shapes at one time. I really was questioning why no one else thought or did this. My answer is...there were others but for some reason their ideas/products didn't work. I am now still forging forward in hopes of just touching a super itty bitty piece of the pie and began another search yesterday only to find that I am in good company. Yes, there are others who either had the same idea as me (at the same time), or possibly saw what I was doing off of my site. I am a little disappointed, but I am choosing to look at the positive. What are they:
1. I know that others thought the multi cutter was good enough to create themselves.
2. I know that my motivation is really to help bring families together and encourage young, ripe, innocent eyes of children.
3. By providing a solution for moms with limited time (which basically means all of us) I want to give these moms an opportunity to spend a moment doing a special activity, they might not otherwise do because of such time constraints.
4. Business wise: I have low overhead and a great technique to manufacture all types of cookie cutter shapes. I am simply cheaper!
5. Competition is good. It keeps us on our toes and will either push us out or get us in the game....bring it on!