
This past week, Samuel, my nephew, came over to play with Dan & Ben. In the morning, we baked cookies using a cookie mix I bought from an old bake shop @ Tanjong Katong Complex. (It's like a mini Phoon Huat!)
Sarah had advised me to prepare the dough and bake the cookies first before letting the kids decorate. However, I thought that would be TOO MUCH work for me (and too little work for the kids!) heh heh! So, I found another way of doing this whole activity without (1) the dough melting too fast for the kids (2) me having to do everything for them.
What I did was to cut the baking paper into little rectangles. Each rectangle was just big enough to fit one cookie. The kids helped me to make the dough--the mix required us to add butter and rub it in. So we all had fun doing that. THEN, instead of rolling the dough out onto the table & making shapes using cookie cutters--this step usually causes the dough to become very soft and melty and then you become unable to "scrap" off your shapes and transfer them to your baking pan, because of our humid weather, especially if you don't work with it fast enough--I gave each kid a small ball of dough, and got them to pound it/flatten it on their small rectangle of baking paper. Then, they each cut out a shape using a cookie cutter and removed the excess dough. While this was happening, the remaining dough in the mixing bowl was put in the fridge, to keep it from melting.
With this method, we were able to work quickly enough and each cookie was baked on individual pieces of baking paper, so there was no need to transfer sticky dough from the table to the baking tray, eliminating the sticky/melty dough problem.
I have one more batch of cookies to do, also from a mix I bought from this same shop. I love this old shop--no one seems to have heard of it, but their cookie mixes are good. I've tried the lavender ones before. And next up, I also bought their strawberry cookies and their sponge cake mix to try. ^__^