How it all started................

I guess you could say it all started about a month ago when I took some sugar cookies to work for my cube-mate's birthday.

But that really only refers to the latest stage of my love affair with the cookies and the chain of events it has set into motion.

When I think about it, making and decorating sugar cookies has been a favorite hobby of mine ever since I was 3 or 4. I remember wanting to help my mom in the kitchen around Christmas while she rolled them out but I was in the way. So she set me up at the breakfast counter with my own little set of animal cutters, a tiny rolling pin, and a very, very, very small cookie sheet (3"x4", maybe!). Now the only things I truly remember about this was that:

1. 
   
   I ate more dough than I rolled out
   


2. I had six little animals, but I only used three - a horse, a cat, and a bunny.



3. The cookies were so small and would bake so fast that most of the animal's legs would burn. This was not very attractive, nor very tasty.

Luckily by then my mom's cookies would be out of the oven to decorate and enjoy; and my zoo managerie of burnt cookies made a quick exit to heaven via the garbage can!

Sadly, over the course of years, these little cutters were lost, without knowing when they left or where they went. Maybe to the toy box, maybe they were pitched because they never made tasty cookies, who knows?

On a whim one day, I did some searching on the internet to see if I could find anything similar. And low and behold on eBay, I found "my" exact cutters! The beloved cat, horse and bunny, along with a lion, a dog and a chicken - instantly recognizable even though those were the ones I didn't prefer to use. A little piece of childhood happiness restored in tiny aluminum forms. Sigh. I was telling my mom about receiving them and she told me that my Grandma had given them to me, which is something I hadn't known. This makes them even more special, as I always refer to that Grandma as the "baking grandma." (I had a baking grandma and a cooking grandma. I think my baking grandma is the one I inherited most of my genes from!)

Aren't they cute????