Baking Cookies

Most of our little family is stricken with a nasty little cold. All of us, except for baby Q. That is so lucky. It is so sad when a baby gets a cold. I am guessing the germs came from T's preschool friends who love to share such things. As is typical, T ended up with the lightest case of the virus. That is a good thing for him, but for some reason L and I always get it worse. She started getting a sore throat one day, and then I got it the next. Then we got sinus stuff, and then lung stuff along with coughing. The whole nine yards. All of this happens of course when I had to get the house ready for chickens to arrive. 

It has been almost a week now that we have been fighting this cold. We are all coughing yet, but it seems to be lessening a bit. Feeling like I had a bit if energy I asked L to pick up some cookie dough on the way home from picking T up from school. I thought T and I could have some bonding time and bake some cookies together. Nothing like a project that ends with eating cookies. 

Now, it is a fun idea, but it leads me to a couple of questions. First, how clean can a little boys hands ever really get? I just ask because his job was to roll the spoonful of dough into a ball and place it on the baking sheet. As I watched him rolling the ball around and around in his hands I was wondering, how well did he really wash those hands? 

That lead to my second question, will a 350 degree oven really kill those possible germs in 12 minutes? If it were not for the fact that they are delicious cookies, I may not have risked eating them. 

T didn't resist eating them either. In fact, he started eating the dough about 30 seconds into the rolling process. I showed him how to roll the dough into a ball, and then gave him some dough to roll by himself. His first ball, dropped a chocolate chip onto the table which he picked up saying," Oooops, a chocolate fell off.", and then he ate it. Finding it tasted delicious, he smelled the ball of dough he rolled and tasted that too. At that point I figured we needed to clarify the rules of cookie baking or there will be one upset tummy and no cookies when we are done. Rule: He can eat that one, but the rest have to go on the baking sheet. He did a great job with it after that. The cookies, which may or may not be little balls of cold virus, turned out perfect. Even T's Mommy approved of the finished product. We need more bonding time like that. =-)