I am sooooo immature.

My husband loves gingerbread cookies. He has been asking when I'm going to back a batch of them for several weeks now. When I told him I had no intention of baking any he started sniffing around the gingerbread house wondering out loud when and if he could eat that.

I decided at that point that I needed to be firm and tell him that in no uncertain terms was I baking gingerbread cookies. I've made them before and they didn't turn out very well and I hated every minute of making them. I do not like to roll out dough. In fact, I hate rolling out cookie dough and if I see a recipe that says, "flour your surface and roll out the dough", I run from it.

So my poor husband asked me to get the ingredients and said he would bake the cookies himself. I dutifully purchased all of the ingredients for him and since we had a free afternoon on Saturday, he and Sarah set out to baking gingerbread cookies. Peter was not interested in helping as he had computer games to play and Bionicles to build so it was just Daddy and Sarah in the kitchen.

They were absolutely adorable to watch. Dan took to baking like any good engineer would. He went through the recipe and gathered every single ingredient in front of him. Then he precisely measured each one before he let Sarah dump it into the bowl. And when I say precisely, I mean precisely. He used a knife to insure that each measuring spoon was exactly full of the exact measurement the recipe called for. And he poured wet ingredients so slowly you would have thought he was pouring liquid gold.

Now don't think I wasn't participating. I was sitting nearby reading my People magazine and offering up such helpful advice as, Geez, you don't have to be that exact when you are measuring and No, we do not have a marble rolling pin you'll just have to use the crappy one that we do have.

Many men out there are leg men or even boob men, but not my husband. He is a frosting man. He would eat any thing if it were covered in frosting. So he was not content just to use left over royal icing from the gingerbread house to put buttons and eyes on the cookies. He wanted to make frosting for them. So he also made a big ole batch of cupcake frosting for the cookies so that when he is eating them he can cover them with frosting.

He did not tell the kids about the frosting knowing that if he did it would get eaten up very quickly. I guess he should have hidden it from me because, while I do not like gingerbread cookies, I love me some frosting. He has caught me on several occasions with a spoon eating out of the frosting bowl. Hey...at least I wasn't using my finger!

Here is a picture of my sweet daughter (who was a great helper, by the way) and her daddy making cookies. I did manage to put my magazine down long enough to snap this picture.

And here they are, so proud of this pan of cookies....(Aren't they cute all covered in flour? Did I mention that flour flying around is one of the reasons I hate making cookies that have to be rolled out?)

Sarah wanted to roll our her own little ball of dough so Dan gave her a little piece of it to work with. She rolled it with the little rolling pin her Aunt Cathy gave her last year at Christmas and when she got tired of using the rolling pin, she rolled it with her hands. Then Peter came in and gave it a few squeezes and then Sarah played with it some more. Dan wisely decided not to use the dough so it got discarded on the counter top. When I saw it laying around on the counter near one of the gingerbread men, I could not resist taking a picture of it.

Because I am a 13 year old boy.....

I am so immature like that.