Jami's Early Halloween

"Jami was so excited for Halloween to be here that we started it early this year"...That was Justin's contribution to the blog this week.  I, for one, do not believe we celebrated early.  I mean, it's not like you can decorate cookies ON Halloween.  By the time you got around to eating them and passing them out to home/visiting teaching families the holiday would already be past.  Justin may not quite see the vision yet, but we're working on it.  Give it a couple years.

The weekend "Early Halloween" apparently started with babysitting James.  No, it wasn't that "scary" or anything, it just happened to fall during the same weekend.  We got to watch him while Jeff and Tasha went to dinner and a show at the Lied Center.  While we were making dinner we let him gnaw on a piece of celery.  It was probably his favorite toy of the night.

Justin's complaining about an early halloween came about because of the date night I planned.  I had been getting on his case (more or less) because I didn't think we "dated" enough, so I was given the task of planning date nights.  It was basically a brilliant plan to get him to do things with me he otherwise would probably not engage in...like decorating Halloween cookies.  Let's just say, he readily agreed to plan next month's date nights :)

So here I am, Saturday morning.  It had been a relatively uneventful morning, since I was just slowly getting things done before going to a Primary program practice.  I decided to make the sugar cookies ahead of time so that we could just focus on the creative part of the process.  I was trying to time it just right so it wouldn't be sitting in the fridge too long, making it difficult to roll out.

I thought 20 minutes would be enough, but man, was I wrong.

Hurdle 1:  I open the cupboard to find out we needed to put more sugar in our container.  Justin is the one who organizes our storage, so I had to rummage around looking for a bag of sugar.  Mission: successful.

Hurdle 2:  I was cleverly going to half the recipe so we didn't have cookies coming out our ears.  I was doing well until I realized I halved everything but the sugar.  *sigh*  So I had to go back and add half more of the rest of the rest of the ingredients.

Hurdle 3:  By this time, I'm starting to run short on time before I had to be at the practice.  Because I now had to do the full recipe I was out of flour.  So I trek back to our extra bedroom looking for flour.  I'm pretty sure I opened every bucket we have looking for one that had flour.  No luck.  I finally opened a box that had bags of flour, wrapped in plastic.  There was one that wasn't, so because it was the most accessible I grabbed that one.  I came back in the kitchen, poured it in the flour container, and started measuring.

Hurdle 4:  I sifted the flour into a bowl (let me just say now, I'm glad I measured flour into a separate bowl than the cookie dough) and noticed dark-colored specks.  Upon further inspection, I became aware that they were crushed up bugs (GAG)!!!  I checked the sifter and yep, ground up bugs stuck in the mesh wire.  I was disgusted that bugs got in our sifter.  I through out that flour, decided I wouldn't be sifting the flour, and started measuring again.  However, as I was measuring I found out (to my horror) that bugs were not in the sifter but in the flour. AHHHH!!!  So now I'm running back to the room to grab more flour, crossing my fingers that the plastic wrap served as a nice protective barrier from those nasty things.  Let's just say, I gave that flour a VERY thorough inspection.  No bugs!  I quickly made the rest of my cookie dough and threw it in the fridge.

Our poor apartment was a mess!  With all the running around, searching through food storage, and leaving dirty dishes everywhere....I'm glad I beat Justin home to clean up before he witnessed the destruction.

The rest of the cookie making went smoothly.  I was trying to teach Justin the difference between decorating and frosting cookies, especially when he wouldn't even put eyes on the bats or ghosts.  He took it well :)  Here are some pictures of the finished products provided with captions from Justin:

   

I even put on my best costume for this picture.

She made lots of sugar cookies for us to decorate and more creative ways then I could count.  Here are a couple of pictures of the ones that we decorated.  The best ones were probably the pumpkins or ghosts. (Jami's addition...That white blog is not intentional.  I accidentally dropped white frosting on that poor bat).

HAPPY EARLY HALLOWEEN!!!