Easy strawberry cookies

COOKIES!!

Who doesn’t love cookies?

Definitely not the children I have birthed, that’s for sure.

I came home from work early the other day and had a few hours to kill before bedtime. Since my kids have recently been begging for more quality time with me , I opted to use this as an opportunity for “quality time” , before “wine time”.

Kids are strange, by the way. Mine are in a phase where they constantly crave quality time with me (I’m not complaining, honestly. I love every minute of it). The problem is that their perception of quality time, doesn’t exactly match reality. I see our car rides, discussions, dance parties, dinner at the table, reading, bike riding, taking them to lesson ( etc, etc), as quality time. They don’t. They view that time as my maternal duty, and think making slime (my worst nightmare) , is quality time.

So naturally, I had the following discussion with them.

ME: What would you like to do together today? Anything but slime guys.

Kids: BAKE!

Me: Bake? Really?

Kids: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me: You don’t want to like…..read? Grow your brain? Play a board game? Do a craft? Play tennis? Ride our bikes and get some fresh air?

Kids: NO!

Me: Bake. You want to bake.

Kids: YES! Woohoo! Baking!

Me: Okay. Baking it is. As long as we all remember this as quality time with mom.

I made them repeat it a few times too. All together now: quality time with mom. 

Of course, since life really is like a sitcom, the next thing that happened was predictable: we had no ingredients. The pantry was empty. The kids didn’t think going to the grocery store was a good substitute for baking, so we had to improvise. Someone had thrown out our overly-ripe bananas (I’m still mad about that). We were also nearly out of flour; all our disastrous home-made pizza on a stone attempts had used up all the flour we had. And we only had a couple of eggs.

So we set out the ingredients we had, did a few google and Pinterest searches, threw in a few modifications and came up with this recipe for : EASY STRAWBERRY COOKIES.

As a healthcare provider, I feel the need to let you know there is nothing healthy about this recipe. We abide by the 80:20 rule in my house. We eat healthy 80% of the time and 20% of the time, we throw caution to the wind and eat whatever we want. Strawberry cookies fall under the “20%” of the time category. I’m not a big fan of eating things from a box , but again, we were low in wholesome ingredients so we had to make do with what we had! It was all about the quality time y’all.

INGREDIENTS:

Since this is all we had in my kitchen, this is all you’ll need to make the cookies.

For the cookies:

• 1/4 cup softened butter
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• A box of strawberry cake mix

For the frosting:

• 1/4 cup softened butter (the whiter, the better)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/2 cup softened cream cheese

EASY DIRECTIONS FOR EASY STRAWBERRY COOKIES FOR EASY QUALITY TIME WITH THE KIDS:

Let’s start with the cookie part:

1. Preheat oven to 350F
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the butter, egg and vanilla. Stir well.
3. Add the cake mix slowly, and continue mixing.
4. Mix until the mixture becomes dough-like in consistency. My kids complained a lot during this part. Yay for quality time.
5. Add a little water if the mixture seems too dry.
6. Put the dough in the freezer for 15 minutes. It should look like this.

7. Form 1 inch balls on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet. We added some cooking spray. Keep them at least 1 inch apart.

8. Bake at 350 F for 8-10 minutes. At the 4 minute mark , you can smoosh the balls with a spoon to make them more cookie like. Do not overcook.

9. Allow cookies to cool while you make the frosting.

Now for the frosting:

1. In a large mixing bowl, mix together the butter and cream cheese.
2. Add the vanilla extract and the sugar. Keep mixing.
3. If you like thicker frosting, you can add more sugar, but we opted to add honey to sweeten the rest.
4. Keep mixing, even if the kids are complaining. Remind them during the complaining and requests for help, that they asked for quality time and they chose this activity. Give them a couple of warnings for fighting too.
5. After the cookies have cooled, apply a thick layer of the frosting to the cookies and enjoy!
6. Add your personal touch.

Store leftovers in the fridge or , if you are like us, give leftovers to the neighbors. It teaches the kids to be neighborly, and the neighbors always appreciate the treats!

TA-DA! Easy. Tasty. Quick and full of quality time with the kids .