Making Cookies with Obama

Although I'm sure Hillary Clinton would disapprove, I stayed home and baked cookies today.


I also watched the inauguration non-stop of course, and the two activities worked quite well to compliment one another.


I have been wanting to make some batches of "thank you" cookies for people who have helped me/our family with various activities lately, and with nothing else planned today but a whole lot of CNN and ABC News, it seemed like a no-brainer.

First I assembled my ingredients: as you can see, these cookies are the real thing - flour, eggs, sugar, butter, crisco, cocoa, chocolate chips - no oatmeal, raisins or splenda (shudder) here

these are the secret weapon for my favorite cookies - Fernwood's Mint Chocolate Sandwiches bought in batches every time I visit Salt Lake

Growing up I had two favorite kinds of cookies that my awesome baker of a mom would make just for me. I like to think she created this first recipe from scratch because she knew exactly what would make me happy - but I actually think it was clipped from a cookie section in the Deseret News some 30-odd years ago. When she assembled and presented to me upon my wedding day a recipe book hand-typed with all her many recipes, here is how this recipe appeared:(this is the same recipe I used today - please feel free to recreate it if you like, I only ask that you give credit where credit is due if it happens to win first place in the cookie baking contest you enter it in - I do not consider this an unlikely scenario)

Here's Barack and me around inauguration speech time -
positioning the chilled dough balls on the baking sheet

place a slightly chilled mint sandwich between two warm, slightly undercooked
(hence doughy) cookies, and give them a gently hug - this causes them to cool
firmly attached to each other.

Definitely a chocolate/mint lover's delight.

And here is the second recipe for today, from mom's recipe book:

no secret imported weapons here, just plenty of crisco, marshmallow and
frosting made of almost pure powdered sugar (I know what you're thinking -
could it be more white trash? mmmmm....no!)

and here are the little darlins' all finished.
I consider these the official cookie of the
Obama/Biden administration in the Richardson household.

I did take a break right around
"walking beside the motorcade in the Inauguration Day
Parade" to go pick Jed up from Kindergarten.
His teacher Ms. Nolan was most excited by the days events.
They watched the events all morning on the projector in their room,
they made little flag-waving paper doll people, and she had them singing an "O-B-A-M-A" song to the tune of "B-I-N-G-O"

Jed with the Obama's

Ms. Nolan and her class cheering and waving on the President

I should also note that we had a noteworthy day on the West Coast as well - today was the 10th day in a row that the temperature has been above 82 degrees in Orange County in January. We broke the new record set yesterday which was nine days in a row.

Also, I won a very cool prize on this website - scroll down past all the cute crafty stuff to the contest giveaway winners. I know exactly what I'm going to use it on!