Baking Cereal Batons

Was it the apron?

I baked "Cereal Baton" cookies this afternoon for my 20-month old son, Donovan while he napped. These surprising tasty baby cookies are made with whole wheat flour, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, baking soda, and wheat germ -- the wheat germ is both in the dough and rolled on the outside. The recipe comes from my favorite cookbook for babies and toddlers, "Le Petite Appetite." My good friend Stacy makes them often for her teeny daughter, Mayavan and I thought it was time I made some healthier snacks for Donovan instead of giving him the super-sweet Earth's Best Alphabet cookies.

Naptime for me is a precious, usually 2-hour, chunk of time that I have all to myself! Having a child is amazing and wonderful but -- wow! -- You don't get much time to yourself. This is the hardest part of parenting for me: the lack of "me" time. Anyway, sometimes I frantically jump from one activity to another during Donovan's nap, trying to get as many tasks done as possible, exhausted by the time he wakes up and other times, I indecisively start and stop a bunch of projects and feel like I've wasted the naptime.

Today, I decided to give over the entire naptime to making Cereal Batons. Nothing else. Just one baking project. And I'll tell you, I enjoyed the process so much more than when I try to multitask. I even put on my apron, which punctuated my commitment to baking these cookies. (Peter and I have matching monogrammed aprons, which a friend gave us as a wedding present -- partly as a goof, I suspect.)

Donovan going for another baton

Working through the recipe, I was careful and focused. I didn't overwork the dough. In the end, I'd say I turned out a handsome batch of batons. Best of all, Donovan ate about four of them and later, kept pointing to their container wanting more. That's success! I think the apron had a lot to do with it.