My kids and I love cooking together. My girls especially love to bake, and we often spend time together baking cakes, cookies, cupcakes and other sweet treats. Recently we decided to try baking some sugar cookies for Christmas, and we planned on decorating them in with Christmas colours and decorations and give them as little homemade gifts from the girls. Unfortunately they didn’t turn out exactly as planned, and they weren’t really suitable to give the family and our friends as gifts.

It all started off great. The kids found some cute cookies that they wanted to make here which were the shapes of stockings, stars, Christmas trees and presents. They found a sugar cookie recipe and we set out to the store to find the ingredients. We took our list of ingredients, decorations, materials to wrap the cookies as gift and utensils that we didn’t have at home that we needed, and started making our way around the store. Everything went well, and I even got a few gifts for the family, and even a food processor that I saw recently and I couldn’t resist. All went well at the store, so home we went.

After getting everything inside and into the kitchen, we decided to start baking. My girls, aged 8 and 10, are quite independent, and really my role was supervisor. They meticulously measured out their ingredients, mixed everything thoroughly. The rolled out their beautiful dough and really enjoyed using their new cookie cutters that we bought at the store. They enjoyed it so much, that they took their time with it, and even sometimes rerolled the dough just so they could cut some more cookies. Finally, they got their cookies into the oven (with my help) and sat in front of it for the entire time that they were inside until they were a beautiful, golden brown colour. I took them out of the oven for them, and they sat by as the cookies cooled.

Next they made different colour icings for the cookies (red, green and white of course) and when the cookies had cooled, they got their creative juices flowing and decorated them, just like the beautiful designs that that they had found online earlier. We waited for them to cool and set, and the girls made some Christmas cards to attach their little packages. The packages were the wrapped with care, and they even tied little bows around them and attached the cards that they made. They next day which was Christmas Eve, we drove around to friends and family members homes and the girls hand-delivered their gifts.

The next day, my parents came over for Christmas Day lunch. The girls were occupied with their gifts that they had been spoilt with. I asked my mother if they had tried the cookies that the girls had made. My mother seemed a bit apprehensive to answer. With a bit of pushing, I finally found out what they thought. She told me how they had given them to the dogs because they didn’t really like savoury cookies. I said to them that they hadn’t been savoury, that they were sugar cookies. Later that evening when I was cleaning the kitchen after another busy Christmas, I checked the ingredients we’d bought the day before. Turns out we bought a big bag of salt… not sugar. Our sugar cookies were in fact salty cookies. Definitely not what we had planned for, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the girls.