Sunflower Cookies

Now that K is on summer holidays, I have been trying to think of fun things to do with him. As it is incredibly hot, the park is kind of out of the question for me. During his last week of school, I took him to the aquarium, Universal Studios Japan for ice cream, and the airport to watch planes take off. I figured at that point I was one month out of giving birth. From here on out, travelling too far is out of the question - baby will be here in less than two weeks! Yikes!! All of that means, that the "fun things" are pretty much relegated to housebound activities.

I asked K what he wanted to do the other day. He had seen some little sunflower pies in one of his school books and decided he wanted to make sunflower cookies. Baking - fine by me! We started with my standard sugar cookie recipe. I only mixed up half a batch because I really don't need a ton of cookies sitting around the house.

K helped make the cookies and did an awesome job. He often likes to "help," which is lovely, but oftentimes just not worth it. This time however, he really did help, and by help I mean he pretty much made the cookies. He mixed the dough (of course I measured - he's awesome, but let's be honest, he's 3).

He folded in the last of the flour.

He took a little break and licked dough off the beater - something he clearly learned from me!

He rolled out the dough.

And finally he cut the cookies. I moved them to the cookie sheet because that seemed like it would have been a disaster waiting to happen.

After that, I cut up some canned pineapple rounds and placed them in a circle just on the inside of each cookie. I usually bake these cookies for about 6 minutes. My plan was to bake them for 4 minutes, take them out and put chocolate chips in the center and then bake them for another 2-3 minutes. Due to the moisture from the pineapples, however, these ended up baking for 14 minutes!

Luckily the chocolate chips didn't melt much. I wanted them to resemble the seeds.

Of course, once the cookies were a tad bit cooled off, K dug in to one of them. He especially liked the chocolate middle - of course.

Each cookie needed about a half of a pineapple slice. I wasn't anticipating this much per cookie, so we ended up running out of pineapple. Instead of just a plain sugar cookie - boring - I had K put some chocolate chips on the top of the final two. He ate one of those as well, starting with just the chocolate.

He ended up looking like this:

 

Aye yai! He was a mess, but a smiley mess. He had such fun making the cookies. Definitely a fun day inside for the both of us.