Supervised baking/peanut butter reindeer cookies

I've shared on here before how I really despise cooking.  If there's something I despise more than cooking, it's baking.  No really, I hate it. There's so much stuff you have to drag out, everything has to be perfectly measured and perfectly timed...ugh, it's just not for me at all.  I much prefer to be the consumer of the sweets, not the maker. 

That being said, last year I got roped into a cookie exchange with some friends.  Let's be honest, I agreed to it not because I really cared about getting cookies, but because the thought of a night out with girlfriends in the middle of the crazy Christmas season was incredibly appealing.  So there I was last year, burning a vacation day to bake cookies (and, subsequently, burning some cookies, but I digress....) 

This year, I was determined I was not going to show up with:  a. burnt cookies OR b. undercooked cookies (I can neither confirm nor deny the rumor that I managed to show up with BOTH of those last year)  Nope, I had something to prove this year.  I had my pride. I had the lessons learned from my mistakes last year. I had...my mother there to supervise. 

Brian was going to the steelers game on Sunday, so weeks ago I had asked my mom if the boys and I could come hang out at her house that day so we weren't stuck inside all day by ourselves.  Then, I got the genius idea a few days before to bake my cookies at her house. I'd found this idea for peanut butter reindeer cookies.  You may be asking yourself why, considering my history with baking, I didn't just take it easy and make something simple like plain old chocolate chip cookies.  I blame pinterest.  As always.  Why bake regular peanut butter cookies when you can torment yourself by adding reindeer body parts??

I won't go into full details of the cookie baking escapade, but let's just say we dealt with dough that was too dry and crumbled when it came out of the oven (batch 1), cookies that were too small to decorate (batch 1), cookies that were too big (batch 2), cookies that lost their antlers (some in every batch) 

BUT, despite all of that, I'm happy to report that some did turn out, and the ones that turned out are very cute.  And edible.  EDIBLE!  I baked cookies from scratch that are edible.  Someone write that down. 

This shot is blurry, but a big shout out to my mom for helping me not burn myself or the cookies, and letting me crash her kitchen for the day. 

And, the finished product...ta-da!! 

So there you have it...I'm done baking until December 2014.