5 Miles

Tomorrow is Will’s turn to bring snacks for preschool. They are studying the letter V, and move on to the letter W next week. It’s fun (but not required) if you can match the snack to the letter–something we’ve not been able to do (I don’t even remember what the letter was last time, I just remember I couldn’t think of any ideas that were easy to take, kid friendly and reasonably healthy).  The only thing I could think of for V was vegetables…and while a good idea, I’m all out of my fresh carrots and any other fun veggies to make a veggie tray (I’m going shopping DURING preschool tomorrow!) and for some reason, this post  on watermelon cookies popped into my head. So, I asked Will what he thought, and he and I decided we were going to make watermelon cookies. (Go look at it that post if you haven’t yet, her pictures are SOOO good, makes me embarrassed to put some up here! And then you’ll understand as I start talking about what I did differently).

So, first off, we chose not to follow the recipe she posted, because she didn’t like the flavor. Since it just looked like a basic sugar cookie recipe, we used my mom’s recipe, in the past it’s our family favorite…but I haven’t made it in a few years and  our dough ended up really sticky, so I ended up adding more flour after I’d added the food color. I also made more of a pink watermelon then red.  So I made the dough, and then while it chilled, I had the boys help me make green sugar. This was also tricky because I only have food color gel, not the liquid kind, and it was REALLY hard to mix! The gel clumped up in the sugar and I did more mixing then the boys. If there is a next time I’ll try to buy the green decorative sugar you see at Christmas time. (Our mxing/mashing made the sugar crystals REALLY small, so they didn’t show up well in the end. I think the bigger, bright green you can buy would really look good here.)

I decided to try to roll the dough into a snake shape, and then roll it in the sugar, and slice off the cookies.

The cutting make the one end flat and so it was a perfect little watermelon shape. LITTLE being the key. Very tiny ones! And it was hard to make them sugar cookie width (thin) so I used my thumb to press them a bit flatter–only that destroyed the cute shape.  I was going to try to do half this way, and the other half roll out and then cut circles, cut them in half in a more traditional sugar cookie way. But, remember how I said how sticky that dough was? That plus just not wanting to do that much work meant I did all of the cookies the roll and slice way. The second ball of dough I rolled up and then put in the freezer and that was a bit easier to cut.

The boys had a great time putting chocolate chips in (those are the seeds). Again, if I did this again, I’d try to plan ahead and have mini-chocolate chips on hand, these were really big for the size. Here’s what they looked like pre-baked.

And post-baked, I’d say they looked less like watermelons then ever! Some even looked a bit alien like.

But, I figure the audience of 4 & 5 year olds won’t care, they taste pretty good and that’s what matters!