baking cookies with small people

see the top one? that was moulded by my tongue. just for you. the taste test the small people being my nephews that is. what could be easier than a cookie-baking afternoon? quite a lot as it turns out but that is besides the point. it was fun though. amazingly we had enough dough to bake a plateful of cookies. amazing because one of the small people spent most of the afternoon knicking dough and stuffing it into his face at any opportunity. make sure you get icing suitable for children - they will squeeze at least half of every tube into their stomachs, so if they are sensitive to colouring or sugar, watch out. place newspaper or a dustsheet under the table. if you forget this part, you will be finding bits of trodden-in dough all over the house (and in your cats' fur) for the following 6 months. anything found on the ceiling doesn't matter because a) you can't reach it anyway and b) nobody will notice it. we used a sara lee cookie mix and kiddie-friendly icing tubes from whole foods.