Dear Kid,

One of our favorite recipes from the new vegan cookie recipe book is Snowball Cookies. And by “favorite” I mean one of the two recipes we’ve made so far. (The fudge recipe is for tomorrow.)

These are fantastic. You are warned.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put parchment paper on two cookie sheets. Parchment paper may be the best invention modern cooking ever came up with.

Beat ¾ Cup of vegan margarine until it’s fluffy. Margarine fluffy, not Gabriel fluffy. Although if you eat enough of these, you can be both.

Add 1 ½ Cups of flour, half cup of powdered sugar (try not to cough from the powdered sugar cloud that engulfs your kitchen), 2 teaspoons of vanilla, and mix thoroughly. Add 1 Cup of dairy free chocolate chips. Eat a few chips to be sure they are good. Eat a few more to confirm your suspicions that they are quite delicious.

Scoop the dough onto the parchment paper-ed cookie sheets. I used my handy-dandy-ice-cream-scoop-like-cookie-dough-measurer which worked perfectly. You want them to look like little hills of yumminess. Be prepared to fight off people who think eating them pre-baking is a fine idea.

Bake for about 12 minutes. They’ll be a little golden around the edges but you will think they need to bake more. They don’t. They are shortbread-y, so they’ll look uncooked when they are perfect.

Remove from oven and immediately sift powdered sugar over the cookies. Do not make the mistake of forgetting to read the recipe the second time you make them and powdering them before you bake because it really doesn’t work out all that well. Let the cookies cool (again, be prepared to fight off the hordes) and sprinkle with powdered sugar again.

Serve.

Do not worry about how to package leftovers. Because there won’t be leftovers.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

I was going to write a Great and Meaningful Blog for today, but then I had to check Facebook because I hadn’t been on in 48 hours and that’s really too long, and on FB I saw a link to 16 secret rules about Disney employees so I took just a quick look which led to a series of Disney characters dressed up for Halloween. When I finished that I realized I HAD to get out of Facebook land—but first I read just a couple of posts, and then I did shut down Facebook. At which point I realized that while I had checked Facebook and one email account I hadn’t checked the other email account and what if Something Important was there? I checked the other account. Nothing important, but there was a link to an article on LinkedIn about words you should never use on your resume and that seemed important so I read the article (nothing new).

Then I really was going to get to work on the Great and Meaningful Blog, but I remembered I was going to look up why fancy soup bowls have wide brims. I’m pretty sure they aren’t called brims, but I didn’t find out because when I got as far as fancy soup I discovered several recipes that looked Most Interesting. When I got to the third recipe, I found a link to a discussion about the Bengals’ football game, and since I hadn’t seen the game I considered it my civic duty to catch up. After which I was really going to write the Great and Meaningful Blog.

Except that by then I had forgotten my original topic. So I decided I’d better start searching My Friend the Internet for Inspiration.

Which of course made me think of the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (it turns out there are tons of extensions on the original including a plush toy) and I remembered that I had stopped part way through a chapter in the book I’m reading (re-reading to be accurate) so I finished the chapter and then I wondered if the author had written anything recently so I looked him up and it turns out that he (Keith Laumer) died in 1993, which would make writing recently unlikely, but I found several titles I haven’t read and requested them from the library which reminded me I have Gone Girl on hold and have to go pick it up.

At which point I remembered that I hadn’t found a topic for the blog, so I decided to get back to work and scan for inspiration.

And you won’t believe what I found!!!

If You Give a Mom the Internet….

Love, Mom

P.S. This is a reminder to focus on studying and not on cat videos.