Mouse's Favorite (Christmasy) Chocolate Chip Cookies

If you've read Laura Numeroff's If You Take a Mouse to the Movies, but have never checked out the Special Christmas Edition of the book, then you've really been missing out.

The Christmas Edition, includes the original story, but also...

Instructions for Crafts:

• An Elf Ornament template




• Sketched directions for candle, and drum ornaments



• A fill in the blank, make your own story, activity



• And, a seek-and-find page.
  

Recipes:

• Mouse's Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies



• Felicia Bond's Chocolate Refrigerator Roll



• Laura Numeroff's Favorite Norwegian Christmas Cookies

Sheet Music for some Mouse-modified Christmas Songs:

• Mouse's 12 Days of Christmas



• A Christmas Medley: Mouse Style

"Real-life" Christmas anecdotes from the author and illustrator.

And, a CD with the songs, and story being read by Jason Alexander.

While flipping through the recipes, we noticed the recipe for "Mouse's Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies" is basically the one you find on the back of a package of chocolate chips, cut in half, but with one Christmasy substitution.


Mouse, like the folk's at Nestle and Hershey, uses butter in his cookies, which as we've discovered before, makes for a flat, spread out, cakey, batch of cookies. Still, a recipe from a story, is a recipe from a story, so we followed it faithfully.


But, I also mixed up a batch using shortening in place of the butter.


I hate to sound like a Crisco commercial, but it really does make a difference when it comes to chocolate chip cookies.


Plain old shortening (which is what I happened to have on hand this time), doesn't have the delicious buttery flavor chocolate chip cookies need, though. So, if you don't have butter-flavored shortening on hand, I'd stick with the real thing - your cookies might be flat, but they'll taste better.

The younger children ate up most of ours, while listening to the story and song CD, that came with the book. The older children had to settle for the Crisco batch, later (in our house snoozers are losers when it comes to hot, out of the oven, cookies). But, without the butter flavored batch for comparison, they didn't know they were missing out, anyway.

As to the younger children, and the CD, when it came to "Mouse's 12 Days of Christmas" - and the 12th day when...

...my mouse gave to me twelve movie tickets, eleven ornaments glittering, ten radios blaring, nine cozy blankets, eight snowmen melting, seven snowballs flying, six perfect pine trees, five pairs of boxer shorts (green with candy canes), four popcorn strings, three sips of milk, two bendy straws, and a great big choc'late chip cookie!

I couldn't resist showing the children the Mouse ornament on our tree (one that came with a mini, hardcover, edition of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, back in T's preschool days)...

...is indeed wearing boxer shorts under his overalls, and they are green with candy canes, just like in the song, a detail they had not noticed before.


Thanks to Laura Numeroff, Felicia Bond, Jason Alexander, and Sarah Weeks (author of the song lyrics), for a fun, and giggle-filled, pre-Christmas afternoon.

It's great to be a homeschooler.