So I had my Saturday "To Do" List ready by Thursday this past week. With school just around the corner, it was time to do the dreaded back to school cleaning of my house. So my Saturday started off with vacuuming the girls' rooms with my mom's Rainbow vaccuum cleaner. If you have never experience cleaning with one of these babies, you should. It's got a water filtration system in it that helps to deep clean the carpet and the air. On top of that, I then steam cleaned their carpets. Both bathrooms in the house also got their fair shair of Mr. Clean, the Shark Steam mop, and baseboards get wiped clean with Chlorox wipes.In the midst of all of this, Mia comes to me: "Mama, can we make cookies today?"
Uhh, we live in Texas. It is 100+ degrees outside. But what is my response? "Sure, baby girl. What would you like to make?"
She responds with, "Something that we can fill with jam."
Wait. What? Like the minions in "Despicable Me", "WHHAAATTTT?"
I have never done that. And though every part of me screams "NO!", we end up looking for recipes online. We finally settle on this one:
That's right. We have to make both cookies and a lemon curd filling. And I have to temper the eggs. And I have to go out on 100+ degrees weather for butter and lemons. When I return from the store, the butter is still cold, so I set it outside in a bowl to soften. That takes all of 10 minutes! It's that hot.
While I zest lemons and squeeze them for juice, Mia cheers me on and watches the 3/4 c. line on the measuring cup. She is so happy cooking in the kitchen.
The rest goes smoothly. I successfully temper the eggs to the lemon mixture without making lemon flavored scrambled eggs. (That's how I explained the concept of tempering to her. She thought this was hilarious.) We make the butter cookie recipe and after we wait the hour for the dough to chill, we realize that we do not have a 1 1/4" round cookie cutter. That's a small cookie. Probably why they are called 'petite.' We are not heavy drinkers by any means, but for some reason, we have a shot glass. And so we flour the rim of the shot glass and cut our cookies out. In the end, we just end up rolling the dough into small balls and flatten them with our hands. They come out basically the same.
So now the fun part -- filling a ziploc bag with the lemon curd and piping it onto a cookie. I read a lot of the reviews of this recipe and all of them said that this step was very messy. One tester even lowered her 5 star review to 4 because of this step. So I had planned to do this myself. No. Mia is not having any of that. She wants to do it all herself. I relent. Turns out, she is a natural at this step. She squeezes the bag ever so gently and fills up the center of the cookie and tops it with another like she had been doing this all her life. No mess here! I do not know what the other testers were doing, but they could learn a thing or two from Mia.
The time has come. We taste the fruit of our labor. Heaven. The tartness of the lemon curd is amazing. Mia says, "ooh, that makes my ears tingle!" You know that feeling on the sides of your throat and tongue when you taste something tart? We love that feeling here at our house. So worth the work.
So this is what I love about summer. The ability to do things like this with my daughters on a whim and not worry about what it might interfere with or what my schedule looks like. The joy in their eyes when you take time out of your schedule and share part of the day doing what THEY want. Sacrifice. Parenthood. I could have said, "No, I am very busy today. Let's wait and do it another time." But what if another time never comes? Was I tired? Yes. Did I want to nap? Yes. Did I? No. Was it worth it? A million times, Yes.
You have never known exhausted until you decide to deep clean your house and make such a difficult, yet easy, petite lemon curd cookie on a Saturday in 100 degree + weather in Texas with a 6 year old.
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