Today was just what the doctor ordered – here in Colorado Springs, we woke up to a nice fresh blanket of white snow, which caused the school district to decide that the kids needed their first snow day of the 2011/2012 school year. It made me laugh, I’m not gonna lie – after being in North Dakota and experiencing a pretty insane winter with -50* temps and nearly two feet of snow falling in a 24-hour period, today’s snow was … well … not worth cancelling school for, ha ha. BUT! I’ll take it! So we had snow and the kids stayed home, and I will admit I busted out the Mariah Carey – Holiday station on Pandora and thought to myself … today is a perfect day to bake cookies with the kids. And, so we did!

Ooh – bonus! Here’s my super awesome recipe for homemade chocolate chip cookies!

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks of softened unsalted butter
• 2-1/2 cups flour
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 tbs vanilla extract
• Fat bag of chocolate chips – I prefer dark chocolate, but you can use semi-sweet

Mix everything together all at once. Use your hands – it actually tastes better without using electric mixers (no really, it’s true). It tastes even BETTER if you have kids mix it together with their hands (just make sure that they’re washed first, because otherwise – eww, hehe).

Have kids use their small hands to make kid-sized lumps (or, you can do one heaping tablespoon per cookie) on a cookie sheet.

Bake at 350* for a few minutes, until the edges of the cookies turn golden brown. DO NOT OVERCOOK!!! Take them out when the center is just barely shiney still (about 7-8 minutes), and allow them to cool on the cookie sheet for about 5 minutes. This is my super awesome not-so-secret-anymore secret to making cookies that stay soft!

BAM! And that’s it, folks!