Winter Weather Cookies

My mother and I have a fondness for ginger bread cookies...or, maybe it's just me and she plays along. Whatever the case may be, when she comes to visit during late Fall/early Winter we always end up making/buying gingery items. This time around those cookies you buy in a tube were on sale, so we bought 2 rolls of gingerbread goodness and they sat in my fridge and sat and sat and sat...all throughout the Holidays until her last day here. I mean I meant to make them for Thanksgiving or for school. I meant to buy all that icing and crap so we could decorate them. I meant to...yada, yada, yada.

You see we had a two week Christmas break, which is usually par for the course (actually if we don't get two weeks we usually get pretty upset and kids start missing lots of school and so on and so on...), but then we added on three, yes, three, extra days because of snow. There was so much snow and muck that we had to reschedule my mother's flight...twice.

So, on the day we were supposed to leave, I opened the refrigerator door saw the cookies and thought...those would be great to make to go with lunch and on our trip to and from St. Louis. 

So we started out with the cookie dough. Lila helped me roll it out and make it into Gingerbread men...um, you can't have Gingerbread Cookies unless they look like men and women, so you can eat their heads and limbs off before tackling their delicious torsos (hmm...maybe I watch too much "Dexter").

We still didn't have the icing and stuffs so I was trying to figure out a way to make them tasty and delicious. Enter this recipe...I obviously didn't make the gluten free Molasses cookies (for another day, perhaps), but I did make the every so amazing, like I want to slather it on my face right now, salted caramel goodness. It's ingredients are simple: brown sugar, butter, cream cheese, salt. Note to you: when it says it firms up if you let it sit, what she means is like OVER NIGHT, not in a few minutes, or hours.

Modern Day cookbook: Chromebook in the kitchen.

The kiddo helped me put them on the pan and we baked about 24 of them.

She also helped by licking the salted caramel yumminess off of the spatula. "Hey Mommy, did you know this has a cupcake on one side and sprinkles on the other? I'm going to eat the cupcake side first."

Then we put the salted caramel in thick layers in between two cookies and then we ate the crap out of them.  She's putting her pinkies up so she can be 'danity' (say with a British accent), at least that's what she told me. I don't know where she gets her ideas sometimes *whistles, backs away* Um, yeah, we also got dressed...sure it was lunch time, but we also knew we had a long, long, long car ride (thanks Chris for driving) ahead of us...on roads that were still an icy mess. Ugh.

The kiddo also learned that when you leave the food on your chair the kittens swat it down (they're still in training  and it was too cold for them to be outside) and eat it. It was a sad lesson, but, um, did any of you know that cats like gingerbread and cream cheese salted caramel? I took this picture before throwing away what was left of the cookie and banishing the kittens (Lizzie and Katie) to their room.