School is out and the kids are home. This means that most parents will be stocking 
up on snacks for those neighborhood swim parties and other events. Snacks can be very expensive though and not so healthy for your kids. To save money and to keep their kids busy during the summer months, many parents like to bake cookies. There are many types of cookies you can make for your children during the summer months. Which type should you choose?
What Do Your Children Like to Eat?
This goes without saying perhaps, but you should make the kind of cookies that you know that your kids and their friends will eat. I remember when I was growing up and one of the moms in the neighborhood would always invite us over for “healthy snacks”. I understand now what she was trying to do, but it was a dismal failure.
We would pretend to like her cookies and then spit them out into napkins when she left the room. The truth is that instead of making the treats that she thought were “healthy”, she should have kept in mind what kinds of things kids like to eat. Make no mistake, I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t be encouraged to eat healthy snacks. I’m just saying that you need to keep things reality based when you are making those snacks.
Easy and Inexpensive Foods
When choosing cookies to bake, I first look at the ingredient list. While baking “special cookies” is a nice treat for the kids during the year, I don’t normally bake such things. I define a “special cookie” as one with a long list of ingredients which I may or may not have on hand on a regular basis. For example, my kids like snickerdoodles. I usually don’t keep cream of tartar on hand simply because I don’t use it a lot in my baking. Since the kids aren’t extremely fond of these cookies and because they require a special ingredient, I don’t regularly make them.
I also tend to avoid cookies that have difficult or time consuming directions. While these cookies are a special treat, I don’t make them on a regular basis, especially in the summer time when the kids are out and about most of the day. Although I like to bake, I can think of other important things to be doing on a beautiful summer day instead of making cookies. This may or may not be true for you and your children.
If you want to learn more about baking, a people search is a great idea. There are baking enthusiasts all over the world who would love to help you; you just have to find them.
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