More Than Cookie Cutters

Today I have some cookie cutter ideas to share. I’m also sharing my feeling that taking time for things you love is self care. I love cookie cutters!!!

This is one of the few things that always catches my eye at the craft store, and that I can hardly resist if it’s a shape I don’t have yet. They just make me excited!

Let’s start with my sugar cookie recipe, because that’s the classic cookie cutter idea. Then I’ll tell you some other fun things we use them for.

For a variation of this recipe, you can trade 1/4 cup flour for cocoa powder and voila! Chocolate sugar cookies!

I collect cookie cutters.

My very first cookie cutter was a gift from my sister, and it was shaped like a butterfly. 🦋 Since then I’ve collected a lot of different shapes. Maybe I should count them some time so I can tell you how many I have. 😆 There are shapes for holidays and shapes of animals and the alphabet. There are shapes of cacti and construction trucks and princess things. I even have a bigfoot and “the perfect man!” 🤣

Honestly, I don’t get to use them nearly as often as I’d like. I’m a busy lady. Sometimes even too busy to write a blog post! Playing with cookie cutters is one of the things I have to steal time for, like I talked about in another post. And most of the time my cookie cutter use has to be a lot faster than the process of making sugar cookies. So here are some of the ways I make excuses to care for myself by get out the cookie cutters. 😃

More cookie cutter ideas

Stencils: This is one way I can use them in our homeschooling. I can pull out shapes related to our lessons and trace them to make a worksheet or color page. I’ve also let the kids use the related shapes to help them draw pictures of what we’re learning. Sometimes I’ve gotten some of that giant paper on a roll and spread it across the table like a table cloth and then pulled out a few shapes for the kids to trace when we have little friends over. 

Sorting: Little kids need and enjoy practicing sorting things, and this is one of the simplest ways to use cookie cutters. They can be sorted by types of shapes, by colors, by sizes, or by the materials they’re made with. I’ve used this in science reviews, having my kids make groups of mammals, birds, etc. 😀

Alphabet practice: Of course I have to use these sometimes to let my littles practice letter recognition. I have one distinct memory of doing a preschool lesson about the letter B where we made sugar cookies with our B cutter and shapes of bears (that we’d gotten on a trip to Bearizona Wildlife Park). I don’t know if it was the kids or me that had more fun seeing those Bs and grizzly bear cookies. 

I also have another distinct memory of having my little kids use the alphabet cutters to spell their names in some peanut butter playdough. The kids loved that they were allowed to taste it. 

Other food shapes: When I don’t feel like making treats, one cookie cutter idea is to use them for a snack or dinner food. There were a few months that our #7 wanted his peanut butter sandwich cut into a train shape quite often. Sometimes I’ve used my shapes to make toast or pancakes more fun. Recently I was making biscuits and gravy for dinner (we are breakfast for dinner kind of people). Normally I would just shape them with my hands and skip the roll and cut process. But this day I had my hands free for a few extra minutes and I got out my construction truck shapes. Yay! That was fun! Definitely some self-care minutes. 

Decorating: Another excuse I’ve used to get out my cookie cutters is decorating. I’ve traced them to get a specific shape for a personalized streamer, like when #5 wanted a bigfoot themed birthday party. We cut brown bigfoot shapes and green pine-tree shapes and strung them up in a pattern on some wrapping ribbon. When the party was over we put it up in his room. This was several years ago. Just recently he told me that having those shapes up in his room at bedtime made him nervous to go to bed. Oops! 😯

Another decorating idea with cookie cutters is to put them out as table decorations.😀 

What’s fun for you?

I hope you enjoyed these cookie cutter ideas. 

Maybe cookie cutters aren’t your thing like they are mine. That’s ok. What is your thing? What is something that feels fun and happy to you? These things are important. I’ve had a tendency to not give myself permission for these things because my to-do list wasn’t done or the house wasn’t clean or whatever. I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t make time for things that make me happy, life will keep passing by without happiness in it. And it’s so much easier to help my family be happy if I am. This really is part of taking care of myself.

Thanks for reading my blog. If you like it, share it. And take time for some fun, because it helps you enjoy your adventure.