We’ve just put our girls to bed after a fun day at home. Tomorrow we head up north to visit family where Mom has told me that it’s too warm to snow. Mmmhmmm. We’ll see if that holds out. *grins*

Like last year, I spent part of today baking. Only this year, I took one of my gifts for a test run. I got a French rolling pin! The marble one I had been using for urm… more years than I can remember was becoming problematic in my dotage, so I asked for a new one and whattya know… it was under the tree!

One of the family’s favorite cookie types is, of course, the kind you have to roll and cut out with cookie cutters. This stems from their beloved great-great grandmother known fondly as “Nanny.” I never had the honor of meeting her in her prime, but from all of the stories I have heard, I would have adored her. She was a fantastic cook and an amazing baker. She happened to make some amazing sugar cookies and sand tarts. Both of which require rolling and cookie-cutting. I have her recipes and have become the family baker. Sooooooo… after spending years rolling and rolling and cutting and cutting and ending up covered in flour (and seeing the occasional cat covered in flour because she didn’t see where she was jumping up onto the counter *giggle*), I have finally come up with a method to ease the triple and quadruple recipes of sugar cookies and sand tarts that are churned out of my kitchen every December.

My savior? Silpats! They’re silicon-based and food doesn’t stick to them. Specifically, the burned-on sugar that results after my girls have finished “decorating” cut-out sugar cookies. So what do I do now? I roll out my cookie dough on the Silpat, cut in the shapes (gently, of course!), remove the excess dough, decorate (sugar cookies) or brush with an egg white and cinnamon wash (sand tarts), pick up the whole shebang and plop it onto my cookie sheet and voila! It’s ready for the oven. I rinse and dry the Silpats between rollouts… but it’s a breeze to do as nothing sticks.

It still takes me a few days to get all of the cut out-type cookies done and it is hard on my hands, but it’s a gift to my family. The compliment that warms my heart the most is, “These taste just like Nanny’s!”