Cookie Monsters

It had sounded like such a good idea….

To thank the Upward Basketball coaches for a great season, I thought we’d make homemade cookies.  Aunt Molly (my beloved Sis) made really cute decorative boxes for the monsters this Christmas, which inspired me.  I could totally see lovely painted boxes filled with delicious homemade cookies!  Oooh, we could put the Upward star on the lid, too…

The first hitch was that the two coaches liked different cookies (peanut butter and chocolate chip).  And of course I didn’t have time to start any of this until the night before the last get-together.  And I didn’t have enough brown sugar — so we all trooped to the grocery store.  I also didn’t have a tried and true peanut butter recipe, so I decided to use the one off the Jiffy jar (I was making Tollhouse cookies anyway).

Meanwhile, we had the decorative boxes to paint.  Two coats because I wanted to be fancy.

One monster opened the paint when I wasn’t looking.  I’m sure you won’t need three guesses to say it was Middle Monster (and you’d be right).  Immediately, she got paint on my island, her shirt, and her toe.  Don’t ask.

Then I forgot and used my Air Bake pans.  I don’t bake cookies often enough to remember that I despise those @Q#&$* pans and I can’t bring myself to throw them out because they cost so much.  I can NEVER get cookies done!  The peanut butter ones didn’t do too badly, but the Tollhouse ones smooshed as soon as I tried to take them off, even after I let them sit a few minutes (and even though I added an extra 1/2 c. of flour).  Grrrrr.  I barely had enough that didn’t look like monster mud pies to include in the box.  The pb cookies aren’t the greatest, either, although they’re not bad.

(I love me a good pb cookie.  One time I lived on them an entire weekend when my high school band teacher dropped me off alone at an All-District Band concert with no transportation and everything on campus was closed.  Thank you, Lord, for Grandma’s PB cookies in the vending machine.)

Then Princess Monster drew the Upward star on top with a black marker and wrote the coaches’ names out.  I wanted the star bigger, but it looked cute the way she did it.  The boxes didn’t look half bad at all.  Even messy monsters can sponge paint!  Hopefully the cookies were a big hit with the coaches.  I know That Man and the monsters looooooved the messy, sticky lumped up Tollhouse cookies, even if it did look like something they made out of clay!