I'm Biggie: avid cook, speedy lunch packer, mom in San Francisco, & former expat fluent in Japanese. 
Host a doable kids’ cookie party
The weekend before Christmas we had one of Bug’s little friends over to the house for a holiday cookie party. No, not the kind of cookie party where each guest brings several dozen homemade cookies and you swap. The kind where the kids get messy baking and decorating their own cookies — aesthetics be damned.
Bug’s friend brought him a present of a kid’s robot apron from Old Navy that matched her own. I haven’t been into Old Navy recently, but these aren’t on their website now. I have seen a few of these robot aprons on Ebay, and a number of other fun kids’ aprons on Amazon
The first year I made holiday cookies with Bug, I wore myself out. I made too many different kinds of cookies and tried to decorate every cookie just so. That level of baking frenzy was fine when it was just me in the kitchen, but now it’s just a recipe for frustration with a four-year-old who wants in on the action. Learn from my mistakes and don’t bite off more than you can chew when you have little helpers! (Read on for my tips on how to host a manageable Kids’ Holiday Cookie Party.)
- For a cookie decorating party, invite only the number of children you can seat comfortably at your table. I skipped the dining room table because of the carpet underneath that would catch colored sprinkles, and seated the kids at the kitchen table instead.
- Line the table with paper if you like, and give each child a paper plate or baking pan with a cooling rack set inside. Toaster oven baking sets
- If you’re going the homemade route, make the cookie dough in advance, refrigerating and even rolling out the dough beforehand. Older kids might enjoy rolling out the dough, but you’ll avoid frustration with wee ones by having the heavy lifting done by the time they walk in the door.
- Don’t have time to make your own cookie dough? Buy ready-made cookie dough from the store, or even just pick up plain cookies for the kids to decorate together.
- If you’re baking at the party, let the kids help cut out the cookies and place them on the baking pans. They might need your help removing excess dough and getting the cookies onto the baking pans in one piece, but it’ll give them a sense of ownership and accomplishment.
- Be nimble on your feet if your cookie dough didn’t turn out exactly as planned. The lime-coconut snowball cookies shown above were actually supposed to be regular sugar cookies, but the dough came out a little too dry to roll out easily. Solution: Make the sugar cookie dough into little balls and bake them off anyway, adjusting the decorations accordingly. It wasn’t Plan A, but it was still fun and tasted good.
- For icing, my veteran mom friend Virginia had a great idea: use a muffin tin (either full size or mini muffin size) to contain all the different color icings, and put a paintbrush in each color. I made a basic icing of confectioner’s sugar and lime juice for flavor, spooned some of the basic white icing into the muffin tin cups, and colored them with food coloring
- For variety, ask the other parents to bring along their cookie cutters and decorating sprinkles (mark the bottles if there are so many there might be confusion about which belongs to whom). While you’re at it, ask them to bring along spare cooling racks and baking pans — you can never have too many, especially if you use them as a decorating platform as well.
- Anticipate your audience: you’re putting on Short Attention Span Theater with preschoolers. Do the kids bake a few cookies, then want to go off and play? Great! Gives the cookies time to bake and cool, and for you to prepare the table for the decorating. Once they’ve decorated a few cookies, do they lose interest again? Go with the flow, pour some coffee for the other parents who’re there, and enjoy decorating the remainder however you like. Enjoy the process and don’t set your expectations for the kids too high; micromanaging’ll just stress you out.
- No confidence in your decorating abilities? If you’re feeling ambitious, put out cookbooks, magazines and website printouts with decoration ideas and photos. If the thought of pulling all that together makes you want to go back to bed and pull the covers over your head, just follow the kids’ lead and make childlike decorations that blend in with the rest of the cookies. No matter what the result, the preschool set will be happy as long as they get to eat a couple. Easy audience.
- When you’re done, the decorations will probably still be too wet to stack cookies on top of each other in cookie tins. For a festive touch, use colored pastic wrap to package up entire plates of cookies to go. Paper plates work just fine, as do plastic boxes you might have saved from cut vegetable platters or other deli food platters.
FURTHER READING:
- How to cut your food bills
- Need for speed: A mommy’s lunch manifesto
- Bentos and the picky eater
- Bento FAQ
- Biggie’s list of top speed tips, tutorials and reviews
December 30th, 2008 | Categories: decorative, for kids, parenthacks, tips | 
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December 30th, 2008 at 4:48 am
wow that sounds like an awesome party. What a cool mum you are. I love bugg’s apron!!
December 30th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Thanks for sharing the cookie party. It was fun to read. While I don’t have kids yet, as a teacher in training, it was great to read how to prepare a party for preschoolers.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am
This is awesome, totally sending it to my sister. Her older son is a little younger than Bug - turning 3 in March - but he’s about the right age where he can sit still for 15-20 minutes (or longer, if NECESSARY) to decorate or put together things like so. Thanks for the really great tips!
PS Love your Foodbuzz apron’s cameo appearance
December 30th, 2008 at 9:44 am
@3 from Yvo: Ha ha, so you noticed the apron! Good eyes. Hey, it was free, so why not use it? That’s my friend Virginia wearing it — I wore one with a drawing of a carrot that says “Bite Me.”
December 30th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Thanks for the great tips on baking with kids! I have two, ages 4 and 7, and know how quickly baking can go from fun to stressful! In fact, after making our holiday cookies this year (about 300 cookies or so, I was standing in my kitchen exhausted and a bit grumpy, thinking how SMART buying store-made chocolate for friends will be next year!)
Sorry to hear about your son’s injuries. Hope he heals quickly. We have a similar tree and two cats running around our house too. I think I’ll ancor my tree now since we’ve had some near misses too.
Love your site! Thanks for all your great tips! Happy 2009!
December 30th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
That’s good advice, and I’ll have to remember it next time I make cookies with my 4-yr. old son. I tried making spritz cookies (the dough is extruded through a cookie press) over Christmas and the dough was too thick for him to help stir, and then it the cookie press was too hard even for me to use it and required the assistance of my husband. Not the best cookie baking experience.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
@5 from Sue: I totally hear you about how baking with kids can go from fun to stressful! One of the things my friend Virginia (mom of three) taught me has been that the kids are really easy to please, so it’s not necessary to stage an elaborate setup fit for Gourmet Magazine for them. Very freeing once I let go of my Martha-esque tendencies.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
@6 from domesticshorthair: Spritz cookies can be hit or miss, can’t they? I’ve had mixed results with the intricate designs; usually my problems occur when I try to press the dough when it’s still too cold from its rest in the fridge.
December 31st, 2008 at 9:36 am
Another tip: Load icing into those squeeze bottles they sell for ketchup/mustard at picnics. You can usually pick up 2/$1. You may need to cut off a little more of the tip and/or thin your icing a little so little hands can work it. This is how my daughter helps decorate; it’s much easier for her to control & cleaner to boot. She still makes a mess with those sprinkles! Thank goodness for the vacuum!
December 31st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
A tip for easy cookies to decorate…
Gordons Food Service (GFS) sells cookies pre-cut in Christmas shapes (bells, trees, and stars). They are delicious! The pack contains about 70 something cookies, costs around 10 dollars, and all you do is put them on the baking sheet and bake for a few minutes. We use these every year in my toddler classroom for the children to frost and decorate. Of course I think the staff eats way more than the children do. They are a butter cookie instead of a sugar cookie and they just melt in your mouth.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Great tips and I love how practical you are in your suggestions. I agree–if you don’t have time to make cookie dough from scratch just buy the premade stuff and enjoy the decorating! To give the kids mixing experience, you can make different colors of icing from scratch–very easy, fun, and tasty.