Saturday, Michael and I went to IKEA because we have an illness. No really. IKEA is the best place to buy picture frames and we needed some last minute gift picture frames. They are not paying me to say that. They have a wide variety of reasonably priced frames. Some might even go as far as to say cheap. Depends on your idea of cheap. Any hoo...Micheal parked the car and I looked at him and said "We are going straight to picture frames. We don't need anything else. Picture frames. That's it." He nodded his head in agreement and we walked into IKEA. We only briefly browsed the kitchen area because Michael wanted to replace his old lunch box. They did not have a replacement that he liked, so we quickly moved on straight over to frames.

Okay... we made another stop in the new pet area and almost bought a retractable leash for Josephine. Then we went over to frames.

The tricky part of IKEA is getting out of the store with only the things you went in there for in the first place. I have yet to succeed at this. We picked up the picture frames we needed. I wanted to look at Christmas wrapping paper. Michael wanted to look around the second chance area. He found a giant map of the world and I found Christmas cookie cutters. I just want to put it on the record here that my impulse buy was way cheaper than his impulse buy. Though I will say that the giant map of the world does look nice behind our TV. I saw those cookie cutters and all I wanted to do was go home and make pretty cookies. Which is strange because I am not the type of person who makes pretty cookies. But I saw those cookie cutters and imagined making beautiful, lightly frosted bears, moose, wolves and snowflakes.

I don't bake. It's not that I can't bake. It's that I don't bake. My kitchen is small with limited counter space. Making pretty cookies means making a mess. Also we do not need cookies in this house. I might eat one cookie and then I'm good on my cookie intake for a half a year. Pretty cookies require work and weekends are for not working. The internal struggle of wanting to make cookies versus my laziness is real. Finally I decided to make the cookies because I knew I could take them to work and it would be a nice treat. My first cookie cutter attempts did not turn out well. The cookie dough stuck to the inside of the moose and wolf cookie cutters. I sprayed all of the cutters with cooking spray. This worked for the bear and the snowflake, but I had to give up on the moose and the wolf. Moose are mythical creatures any way and probably jerks.

I made a few bears and a lot of snowflake chocolate sugar cookies and then delicately piped icing onto each one. And you know what? They all turned out just as I had imagined. They weren't perfect, but they were very pretty and tasty. The people at work loved them. I almost want to make and decorate more cookies. 

Almost.