Trevor and Noellen's Day of fun

Trevor, Noellen's nephew, came back to Chicago for a quick visit this Thanksgiving weekend. His brother, Tyler, stayed at home with Mom and Dad, recovering from ACL surgery. He's doing well and we'll give him a big shout out here for being such a trooper throughout the whole thing. We really hope he heals quickly and as pain-free as possible.

Trev and Noellen felt like doing some baking, but there were a few problems. First, we could only use ingredients we had on hand - it was the night of Thanksgiving and the grocery stores were closed. Second, when we did figure out what to bake, we discovered that one of our ingredients was fat-free. Usually fat is needed when baking so we weren't sure what was going to happen...but as long as the reliable Kitchen Aid mixer was doing the work, we'd be okay.

Actually, the dough seems to be looking pretty good. Here, Trevor is using is handiwork to roll the balls into perfect sphere's...

Now's he's pressing some criss cross designs into the balls.

How'd you like to jump into that?

Final step is to decorate. Trev's got the perfect touch!

Our first batch is out of the oven...they turned out pretty good!

We use food coloring to come up with some new colors for our cookies...here Trev is carefully adding blue drops to get a perfect turquoise blue.

I think he did it! And this time, instead of using the fork, he used his pointer finger to poke a divet in the cookie, then topped it off with more colored balls. Here they are before going into the oven....
8 minutes later, the cookies are done. I think they came out perfect. Trev is quite the baker!
Some more pics of the final product.
We did some tasting along the way, to say the least! Our experience turned out pretty well. I thought the excitement was over for the evening, but I was wrong. After brushing our teeth before bed, Trev did a little wiggling and out came his molar!

I was a little freaked by all the blood, but Trev assured me it was normal. It's been a while since I've lost a tooth. The next day we played some Rummikub and just chilled out. We stopped at Portillo's with Papa - Trev recommends the ribs and then headed back up to Pewaukee. A fast trip but always fun. We love having Trev around!