Last week, my friend came over with her two daughters. Little One and my friend's daughter are really good playmates.
We thought it would be fun for the girls to make some cookies. The recipe my friend had was the Rolled Natural Sugar Cookies one from the www.Care2.com site.

The recipe was very easy to follow and perfect for doing with three year olds! Kids love helping and they love baking! They're also learning how to measure, mix, follow instructions, as well as seeing what happens when certain mixtures come together and change form.

I'm not really certain that my newly 3 year old really cares that liquid mixtures turn into solids when dry ingredients are added, or that the soft cookie batter solidifies and turns into cookies when baked in the oven. She may not connect those things yet, but she sure has fun mixing and baking!
I love is that this recipe calls for whole wheat pastry flour instead of regular white pastry flour and natural whole foods sweetener. We do have agave, local honey, maple syrup, and other natural sweeteners, but I chose to use some organic raw sugar cane.

What I love best about this recipe? Usually recipes call for a decorative sugar icing. This one uses fresh fruit! We decorated our cookies with blueberries from the region (Sudbury) and raspberries from our farm. I store lots of our produce in the freezer for winter use. The local berries came in handy for decorating the cookies.

Here's the recipe my friend found on www.care2.com.

Rolled Natural Sugar Cookies

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups choice of whole foods sweetener
• 2 eggs
• 3 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 3/4 cups organic whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Cream the butter and in a large mixing bowl. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Combine the dry ingredients in a small bowl, and stir into the butter mixture a bit at time, blending thoroughly as you go. Pat the dough into a ball, cover, and refrigerate for at least three hours or overnight.
Lightly flour a cutting board, and roll dough out to about 1/4-inch thick.
Cut out cookies with cookie cutters. Decorate with colorful pieces of fruit, such as pieces of organic blueberry and cranberry, grated carrot, diced cucumber peels, and apricots. Place cookie on a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake in a preheated 350 F oven until golden, about 8 minutes.
Makes about 4 dozen cookies.