Presidents' Day

The other project that I did at Jessica's house was:

A trial run of Presidents' Day cookies!

I decided that this year I wanted to celebrate either Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Presidents' Day by making cookies shaped like them.  I found a cooking store online that sold cookie cutters shaped like almost everything, and since I developed this interest too soon to bring it to fruition in time for MLKJ day, I ordered cookie cutters of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  

While I was in California for Christmas, I found my favorite sugar cookie recipe that I used to use when I made cookies a lot, back during my first couple years of college.  I was way excited to find the recipe; I hoped that it would turn out right here, but I knew it might not--my recipe for chocolate chip cookies is awful in Utah, despite being amazing in California.  

So at Jessica's, we made the sugar cookies and tried decorating them to see how I would want to go about it all when it was time to actually send them.

The recipe worked fine.  Jessica wanted us to have a bake-off because she has a sugar cookie that tops any sugar cookie recipe, and I agreed.  Buuuut, then it turned out she didn't actually have almond extract, and nobody was going to the store at 11pm.  So my recipe won.  (Victory by default!)

We let the dough chill overnight, and we ran our 4K or 5K or 6K the next morning, and then later in the day we invited Erin over to actually cut and frost the cookies with us.

We had fun.  On our first Lincoln that we painted, someone thought we should paint some neck between his beard and his coat.  That came out pretty awesome.  We referred to that Abe Lincoln cookie as our lumberjack Abe after that; that's what he looked like.

So we made a bunch of cookies.

When I made them to actually send to friends, I did not give Lincoln a neck.  And I made Washington's hair bigger, because I thought it looked better that way.

So.  That was our other fun project.  I love random holidays!