Simply *The Best* Recipe for Cookie Cutouts

Yes, I know that's a bodacious claim, but I believe it to be true. Deliciously, lip-smackingly true. A delicate-tasting cookie with more flair than your basic sugar cookie cutout, these are even wonderful plain -- sans icing or frou-frou decorations. Although both are fun!

Our Girl Scout troop is going to decorate Christmas cookies for a local charity at our next meeting. I'm making the cookies and icing ahead of time. Regular sugar cookies are fine, but if you really want to surprise folks -- in a good way -- try this recipe this season.

Simply the Best Cookie Cutouts
2 ½ cups plain flour
1 t cinnamon
½ t ginger
½ t baking powder
1/4 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
3/4 cup butter
½ cup honey
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg

Stir together flour, cinnamon, ginger, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. Cream butter, honey, and sugar until smooth.

Beat in egg.* Stir in half the flour mixture, beating well. Beat or stir in rest of flour.

Cover and refrigerate for 1 ½ hours or until firm enough to roll and cut. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll out dough on a well-floured surface (flour your rolling pin as well!), about 1/3 of the dough at a time. Cut with desired floured cutters.

Place on lightly greased cookie sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes until lightly browned. Makes 3 to 4 dozen cookies.

After the cookies cool completely, ice with your favorite cookie icing (the kind that sets up is best) and decorate in the way that makes your heart the happiest. Don't forget to much a few naked cookies!

* I emphasized this step because I forgot to do it in my first batch of dough and had to add it in after the flour. The cookies didn't suffer a bit, but it's easier to add the egg when you're supposed to.

Streaming Christmas Music -- From Europe and UK Web Radio

For an interesting twist for your Christmas listening at home, check out this website: ListenLive.eu, which features radio stations in Europe and the UK streaming live on the internet. Last night, I rolled and cut out cookies while nodding along to music broadcast from France, and this morning it's the UK.

I love hearing old favorites in new (to me) arrangements, as well as songs I know and unfamiliar tunes. I've never heard Lou Rawls's wonderful rendition of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" until I hopped on Cherie Noel last night.

And the best? No commericals! Every once in a while, a Voice says the name of the station, but that's it. On Cherie Noel, the Voice also flung out something more I couldn't comprehend. So much for my conversational French.

I'm going to work my way through the list this season just for fun. Why don't you come along?

Weekly Happenings: A Few Beginnings and Advent

The house is very quiet. Himself and the girls have gone on an overnight trip out of state to see Himself's alma mater play in football play-offs. Although I've been looking forward to some quiet time alone, and I enjoy my own company, I have to admit the quiet is deafening. This must be how the dogs feel when we leave them behind.

We began two new AO Year 5 readings this week: Abraham Lincoln's World and Of Courage Undaunted: Across the Continent with Lewis & Clark. We said goodbye to Abigail Adams last week; you can read my thoughts on that here. Other readings we enjoyed included King Arthur and His Knights, This Country of Ours, Gods and Heroes, and "Poplicola" from Plutarch's Lives.

Much to Miss Priss's revulsion, we learned about spiders and silk in Storybook of Science this week. I was so intrigued that I hopped online to find a video and more information. I blogged about my findings, and you, too, can learn more by popping over to that post. And in A Child's Geography: Explore His Earth (which is a tweak of mine; AO schedules volume 2 for Year 5), we tried our hand at a project that depicts the moon's gravitational pull on the ocean tides.


Gravitational pull project.

Our geographical study of gravity nicely coincided with our recent readings from Sir Robert S. Ball's Great Astronomers and its biography of Sir Isaac Newton. While we'd been following along quite adequately until last week, Ball's writings on Newton's gravitational studies are too esoteric even for me. We managed to understand that Newton proved mathematically Kepler's laws of observation regarding planetary movement in our solar system; but I felt we needed a bit more explanation. Turning to the online world once more, I found what I was looking for at Physics4Kids. Here's the link to the article we found most helpful.

Miss Priss has been making strides with Math Mammoth, but then I found (via Blossom at North Laurel Home & School; thanks, Blossom!) cK12.org, the home of "customizable, free, curriculum-aligned content for K-12." So we did some work in their sixth grade math program, which was a review for her. I only wish they offered a teacher's edition of this flexbook! It would save me some time. Tiny Girl began a geometry segment in MEP math, working with perimeter, area, and volume of solid figures.

We also got a handle on direct objects with our new grammar program. Read my post on that here. And we also began a new online and free French program, provided by our library system.

But it's not all been work, work, work! We managed to get in some Christmas decorating. Our tree is in all its glory, the Christmas village bedecks the top of the piano, the stockings are hung, and the nativities are gracing our foyer dresser and bookcase. Both Tiny Girl's advent garland and our advent candle, a gift from our friends from Germany who visited for Thanksgiving, add to our time of preparation.

 


My first nativity, a gift from my mother many years ago.



A smaller, funkier nativity, another gift from my mama.




Our Christmas village, a mix of Dollar Tree finds and handpainted treasures from Michael's.

 

Miss Priss, still sporting her purple cast, decorating the tree.


Today was our second morning of hard frost. Miss Priss was so taken with the hoary world that she ventured out for a few photos.

A sweet gum ball leaf in the grass, both silvered with frost



Look at the lacy edges of these tiny leaves!



Tonight I will be cutting out and baking Christmas cookies for our Girl Scout troop to decorate at Sunday's meeting. We each eat one or two, but we give the majority to a local charity for women and children. A double batch of dough chills in the fridge while I type. Perhaps this will be the kick-off to my Christmas baking bonanza! If you need something to get you started, I'll post the recipe in the next couple of days.

I'm linking up with:

 

Spider at Work -- With Silk

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.
-- Edwin Way Teale

Today the girls read Chapter 25, "Spiders," from The Storybook of Science, by Jean-Henri Fabre.* Uncle Paul's description of the spider spinning its web is facinating, but seeing such a work in action makes an unforgettable impression. I searched on YouTube for a video that clearly showed a spider's spinnerets in action, and this one is really nice. A few seconds into the video, the camera zooms in for a close-up view.



The Smithosonian National Museum of Natural History has an excellent article on spiders here. Although technically dense, I found especially intriguing the three paragraphs related to spider silk. Did you know that a spider can produce different types of silk to use in different ways, such as one for spinning webs, another for cocooning eggs, and yet another for wrapping captured prey? Silly me; I thought it was all the same!

Silk is also extremely tough. This article on Wikipedia states, "A frequent mistake made in the mainstream media is to confuse strength and toughness when comparing silk to other materials. As shown below in detail, weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel, but not as strong as Kevlar. Silk is, however, tougher than both [toughness being the ability to absorb energy before breaking]." The article goes on to delineate many other of silk's impressive qualities. I had no idea it is so remarkable.

At our Maine cabin, there's always a spider or two that makes a web in the corner of our picture window (outside!) or in the corner where the exterior wall and roof overhang meet on the deck. I let them be. I like watching them in action when I can, although they tend to be secretive. To me, their webs are things of beauty.

* The Storybook of Science is a new addition for science in AO Year 4, but I'd heard pleasing things about it in the past and decided we'd read it even though we're in Year 5.