A Jammies day, waffled cinnamon buns and baking cookies

I love baking, or experimenting with cooking really yummy things (as in, highly caloric, not-so-healthy things) but I don't do it much anymore just because Andrew doesn't like it around the house, and I don't have much time to do it either. I don't even care if I eat the stuff... and typically I don't. I just like to make it. Plus, have you ever noticed if you spend a lot of time cooking something you have no interest in eating it once all is said and done - it's almost like you feel like you already have after standing around it for so long. But, we generally eat pretty healthy around our house, so I'm always trying to come up with new healthy recipes, or figure out how to 'healthify' existing recipes.
This weekend, all of that went to hell in a hand basket. I made one of my old go-to favorites (a pasta bake) and did some baking.
I was actually making dinner for friends of ours one night to help them out with something and decided to do the pasta bake, so I made two and kept one for us.
(I cook the pasta like usual, but just a few minutes less than you normally would since it cooks a little more while it bakes. I sometimes put meat in it, sometimes I don't. Either ground sirloin or sausage... Brown the meat and add it to the pasta sauce. Combine the pasta with the sauce/meat mixture, spread it into a casserole baking dish and cover it with shredded Italian cheeses and bake for give or take 30 minutes until all of the cheese is melted)

THEN, on Saturday morning I made these yummies ... waffled cinnamon buns!
You just put the uncooked cinnamon rolls into the waffle maker

Close it and let it cook for about 3 minutes

And there you go!

Waffled cinnamon buns. I made them three ways - some with the traditional white icing, some with a caramel icing, and I topped some with the Smuckers blueberry syrup.

(definitely use cooking spray on the waffle maker. They are sticky little suckers.)

Andrews sister was in town this weekend for a short trip. So they went into the city for a concert on Saturday night.

The kids and I did some baking!

Emma really gets into making cookies. She takes it very seriously. Drew likes to play with the dough and mess up all of Emma's little cookies that she so seriously and carefully places on the cookie sheets. He is such a boy.

She loves to stir the dough. I put all of the ingredients in, use an electric mixer - and then give it to her with a stirring spoon. (yup, they stayed in jammies all day that day... why not?!)

Drew & Aunt Amy

Ok, this was cracking me up. I did not laugh at her, I was actually very proud of her.... but before sticking the cookie sheets in the oven I had to quickly duck away and resize and space out the cookies on the sheet. But, she made these from the dough all by herself:

So cute. (And then you can see towards the bottom right where Drew was swiping them off the pan (his little finger prints smeared in cookie dough) and she was getting so mad at him.

Then he decided he wasn't so into making cookies and went back to street sweeping our kitchen floor.

Before I knew it, as always when we decide to do a project like this, I turn around and both of them have decided they would rather watch a movie, and I'm left with finishing all of the cookies. That's ok though.

I also made a big batch of my (from scratch) chocolate chip cookies, but I wasn't too happy with how they turned out. It was either my new cookie sheets and I need to adjust times or temps for them OR I let the butter get too soft before using it (I think the latter) It's good to soften the butter before using it to bake, but I pulled it out of the fridge and I guess did not take into consideration how much longer it takes to do these things with 4 extra little hands in the mix and it got too soft by the time we had made the first batch. So my chocolate chip cookies spread too much.

Emma had not napped and also has a little cold going on, so she crashed shortly thereafter.

Playing the other day:

Sunday Andrew went to a football game... The kids and I took Amy to the airport... we played with play doh, went over to my parents to visit for a little bit, and went home and got in jammies for what I thought would be an early night. Turned out not to be such an early night after all, because they decided they were not going to go to bed... so we cuddled and watched tv and waited for daddy to come home.