Jello Cookies

We had an open night tonight.  Normally on a night like this, Jared would take the kids downstairs and wrestle them or play dodgeball or some other mom-disapproved game.  Since he's gone, I wanted to be the fun parent. 

I'm never the fun parent, but I thought I'd give it a try.  I had to do it my own way though.  Of course.

So, after dinner, the kids and I made Jello Cookies.  We followed the recipe on I Heart Naptime.

Don't you just love this picture??

I need for you to keep a few things in mind.  First, our cookies did not look as beautiful as the originals.  That's okay with me, but I need you to know that I know.  Second, I only snapped a few quick pictures on my cell phone with my messy hands.  I was in Fun Mom mode, not Blogger mode.  I decided to focus on having fun with the kids rather than getting good pictures.  Oh, and I didn't edit any of the pictures.

I had all 3 kids help me make the cookie dough.  Then I divided the dough into four equal portions and gave one to each kid (and kept one for myself).  We each chose a flavor of Jello from what I had on hand.  Yes, I already had 4 boxes of Jello on hand (5, if you must know).

Each person had to knead 2 tablespoons of Jello into their dough.  I put the rest of the Jello into a bowl and mixed it with a little sugar for a later step.

I let the kids add food coloring to punch up the vibrancy of the dough color.  Griffin's Jello was watermelon flavor, but he wanted to add blue food coloring.  I didn't argue.  Griffin does things his own way.

Nora's cherry dough was bright red, so I added a little purple to my raspberry dough to make our distinguishable. 

Then we had to break off a little dough, roll it into a ball, and roll it in the Jello and sugar mixture.

Normal Mom would have insisted on using a cookie scoop to get the dough balls all equal in size, but Fun Mom let the kids estimate and just occasionally told them to make one bigger or smaller.

Once the pans were full, I flattened the dough balls with the bottom of a drinking glass.

Into the oven they went!

When we finished rolling the rest of the dough, we had an odd amount left of a couple colors, so we just combined them!

This was a messy project, but we all survived it.

Our warm, fresh cookies:

And the mixed-flavor cookies:

I made the kids take their showers while the cookies cooled.  I may be Fun Mom, but I'm also Smart Mom who also happens to be Tired Mom Who Wants to Hurry Along Bedtime.

We all sampled each flavor of cookie.  Cherry and raspberry seemed to be the biggest hits.  The kids liked watermelon, but I just don't like watermelon flavored things.  Nolan's peach cookies were a bit bland to me, but he really liked them.  He just likes anything orange.

These were really fun to make, and the cookies are super tasty.  This recipe could be used for so many things.  We started naming the holiday applications:  cherry and lime for Christmas, strawberry and blue raspberry for 4th of July, any pastel colors for Easter, and orange for Halloween (although the kids were concerned about how to work in black; they theorized that you could do grape Jello and add black food coloring or just roll the orange cookies in black sugar).

I hope your Monday evening was as fun as ours!

Jessica